Hello, this is Dr. Zhao. I'm a professor in Supply Chain Management at Rutgers Business School. In this video, I'd like to tell you the story of American Airlines Group and provide a course overview on business intelligence and competitive analysis, or equivalently, competitive intelligence. As an example, let's look at American airlines in year 2019. It is the world's largest airline by fleet size, revenue, passengers carried, passenger-kilometers flown, and the number of destinations served. It operates almost 6,800 flights per day to nearly 350 destinations in more than 50 countries. It was rated the best North American Airline in year 2019 by Business Travelers Asia-Pacific. Despite its size and awards, American Airline's stock price is against the trend. This picture shows the stock prices of American Airline, United, Delta, and Southwest. Together with the S&P of 500 Index. Clearly, America Airline is performing a worst in the stock market as compared to its major competitors in the US, and moving in the opposite direction from the S&P 500 index in recent years. American Airlines is clearly in trouble. Just by looking at its stock prices. So American Airlines needs to first discover the problems and then solve the problem. A typical management consulting project where the companies may have to spend millions of dollars. Specifically, the questions are what are the problems and opportunities. In this course, you will learn business intelligence and competitive analysis, or equivalently, competitive intelligence, to discover and prioritize the problems in a three-layer analytics approach. First, an industrial analysis, to compare industries to industry, to assess the market potential, risk, and the competition intensity. Second, a competition positioning analysis, which zooms from industry to companies to see where the company stands in the competitive landscape. Third, a company level analysis or enterprise diagnosis to compare individual companies to see their strengths and weakness. To discover performance drivers, levers, and finally, key issues and the causes. Specifically, competitive intelligence may consist of the following elements. First, industry analysis may include industry trends, profitability distribution for risk assessment, competition intensity for barriers of entry, and value chain analysis for the value added and market power. Second, competition positioning may Include profit frontier, return versus risk, enterprise ranking and the KPI examination. Finally, enterprise diagnosis, including the comparison and the trend analysis at the company level to assess individual companies' strengths and weakness and the use of value driver and the breakdown analysis to discover drivers for financial performance in the industry and pinpoint to the problems and causes for the company. Such tasks are challenging, often costing the client company millions of dollars, and requiring a team of consultants, weeks or months of work. This is true because business intelligence and competitive analysis requires the collection of a large amount of data. A complex industry classification to pinpoint which industry this company belongs to. Sophisticated analytics models and powerful data visualization tools. Upon completion of this course, you will gain knowledge, skills, and experiences in utilizing financial data, industry classifications and analytics models for effective and efficient competitive intelligence analysis. You should be able to conduct competitive intelligence on companies and industries of your choice like a management consultant. Specifically, you can answer these questions for the companies and industries of your choice. What are the market potential, risk and entry barriers? Should I focus on my core business or diversify? Where do I stand in the competitive landscape? What are my strengths and weaknesses relative to my competitors? What factors may drive a company's financial performance in my industry? What are my key problems and causes and so on. This course is designed for anyone who is interested in using data analytics to discover and prioritize problems for enterprises in a competitive environment. That is, business intelligence and competitive analysis, which is a important part of most management consulting projects. The course is designed for beginners with no prior experiences. The time commitment is 2.5 hours per week for four weeks. It will be helpful if you know general business concepts, and supply chain management basics.
