[SOUND] Hi everyone, welcome back. In this session, we will like to discuss the deliverables that you completed and submitted in modules one, in modules two, and in modules three. And to also discuss some of the expected takeaways from the assignments. In these modules, our goal was to gain an understanding of the business situation that WCSC faces. This included identifying the key challenges and problems as well as looking internally at WCSC strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, we hope to understand WCSC's value proposition as well as the key activities in which they are engaged. Finally, we hope to consider how these different activities create and generate costs that must be successfully managed. As well as how these activities support and creates values for both WCSC and their end customer. So, as you was going through the assignments, some of the problems and challenges that you may have recognized while reading through the case study included things like development time. You might have noticed that that was two years to develop their products. Purchasing patterns and behaviors, how that was changing, the customer base were moving to more less expensive devices. And also the need for continual new product development and new product improvement. And also shifts in a distribution channel where the distributor's roles were starting to grow. And there could have been many others that you had encountered and considered in your analysis. So, when faced with these challenges and market changes and as well as lots of uncertainty, management really needs to make decisions to support short-term profitability and long-term strategy and growth. And so as you start to work toward module four, you will see how important these decisions and understanding these key challenges were as you try to determine what is the optimal product portfolio. Additionally, you will make decisions that will impact WCSC's value proposition. We can kind of think of the value proposition as creating a compelling rationale for a customer to purchase your products. How your value proposition helps acquire customers, retain customers, and grow customers is very important. And this is accomplished by creating, delivering, and capturing value. Creating value means that you have identified a target market with a problem that WCSC can uniquely satisfy. Delivering value means that WCSC can mobilize and allocate the required resources to deliver the solution to that target market. And capturing value means that WCSC can successfully manage its cost in line with its revenue to continue to provide solution to its customers. So, to create and deliver and capture value may require numerous activities and tasks. The activity map can serve as a visualization tool to help understand some of those potential relationships between stats. This activity map shows a partial map for WCSC. At the core of WCSC's organization, what we consider their core elements or their value proposition, includes brand recognition, technology innovation, and customer support. As well as many others you probably had recognized in the case, and these are supported by many different activities. And so we have an example of collaboration with manufacturing network, integrating into customer products, and also attending showcases at trade shows. And so you can kind of think of these, what do these activities do to add value and to support the value proposition for the organization? And these activities may be considered cost drivers, value drivers, or kind of a hybrid of both. And so if we kind of map out this analysis, we can look at each activity separately. And kind of identify what will be those factors that will generate costs, or those elements of factors that might generate or create value. So if we just take one example, showcase at trade shows, so you might have things like the travel fees, the time, materials. But one of the great value elements of that is you understand customer needs. And you also get to browse and understand competing offerings that are in direct competition with your product. And so, now that you have an understanding of the business environment and a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of WCSC, we now must make decisions regarding WCSC's product portfolio. So, we need to construct a decision model that outlines our decision criteria and how decisions will be made. This decision model should have both qualitative and quantitative factors. And these factors might include the ROIC as you saw on the case, sales trends, customer behavior, and other market dynamics. The decision model will be used to make final recommendations on product elimination, product retention, and maybe a wait and see approach. So I hope you find module four both challenging and informative. And thank you for your time, and see you soon. [SOUND]
