Business Domain Decision Method for Manufacturing and Service
This paper deals with a study on a method to support the decision on entering business areas in a business model consisting of manufacturing and service. This method divides the business model into business areas by the functions that support a company to decide whether it should enter business areas. This method prioritizes the areas from the aspects of profit opportunities, barriers to entry, and interactions between the areas. This method reduces the time to decide which business area to enter and reduces the number of examination objects to the number of business areas (n) or fewer from the total number of possible combinations (2 to the 2nd power n). To confirm the efficiency of this method, we demonstrated two case studies in the IT services industry. In the first case study, from the perspective of a UPS battery supplier, the number of examination objects is 3 when the number of business areas is 11. And the first case study indicates that a suitable strategy for a battery supplier is to concentrate on the strategy of supplying batteries. In the second case study, from the perspective of an IT service provider, the number of examination objects is 10 when the number of business areas is 11. The second case study indicates that a suitable strategy for an IT service provider is vertical integration from software development to data center operation and hardware manufacturing.