China resource - My dream - The CEO " Stregtic analysis on informatic for the future development

在华润七十多年的历史中，我们曾经进行了多次转型。最近十年的快速发展，使华润成功地从贸易公司转型为多元化企业，我们的成绩有目共睹。当前，面对日趋激 烈的竞争，面对日渐庞大的组织，面对与日俱增的管理复杂性，面对持续快速增长的压力，华润必须开始新一轮转型。具体来讲，我们的生存法则要从资源占有型向 管理经营型转变，我们的管理模式要从粗放式管理向精益化管理转变，我们的思维逻辑要从传统性思维向颠覆性思维转变，我们的经理人的角色要从创业家向企业家 转变，我们的决策方式要从个人英雄主义向集体决策转变，我们的企业能力要从能人依赖型向个人能力组织化转变，我们的管理方法要从经验管理向科学管理转变， 我们的管理思想要从市场反应向市场预应转变，我们的管理方式要从人治向法治转变。为了推动这些转变，启动新的变革，我们有必要充分利用信息化的技术手段， 迅速提高组织效率，建立起快速的市场反应能力，从而提升企业核心竞争能力，促成我们长远战略目标的实现。

首先，我们应该以长远的战略眼光看待信息化的价值和过程。集团在过去几年快速成长壮大，管理的广度与深度成倍放大，但因为信息的获取和分析缺乏平台，信息 的质量给集团的战略决策和管控增加了难度。加上我们所从事的行业都是高度竞争的行业，国内外宏观经济环境又风云变幻，我们必须通过信息技术，通过信息化， 提升信息的获取速度，提高信息获取质量以支持我们的可持续发展，支持我们战略的落地、文化的渗透。

信息化的实质不是技术问题，而是管理的问题、是文化的问题、是生意模式的问题，是集团战略体系的一个重要组成部分，各级一把手应以长远的战略眼光看待信息 化的价值和过程，要及时了解、勇敢面对项目中发现的业务问题，并安排资源去解决它。

其次，我们应该看到信息化的过程是推动管理优化的过程，同时也是持续管理变革的过程。信息化是一个抓手，它能够把过去业务快速发展过程中所忽视所积累的基 础管理问题一一暴露出来，但如何梳理，如何规范，还必须通过业务人员切实地参与进去，尤其是规范和流程。信息化是一个很好的培训和学习过程，好好地利用这 个机会，多派人参与到项目中去，提升业务人员的技能和管理水平。信息化本身不是目的，它的真正意义在于，与企业管理形成一个相互作用的良性循环：一方面， 管理对信息化不断提出新的要求，促进系统的不断改良完善；另一方面，信息化对管理不断提出新的适应性，要求管理不断地创新，从而使华润的管理处于持续的变 革与完善中，推动华润的不断发展和永续经营。

着眼未来，我们应充分借助当前集团实施信息化战略的有利契机加快业务的梳理和规范化，进一步夯实基础管理、优化管理流程、提升管理水平，为日后的精益化管 理、实现内涵式增长打下基础。

再次，信息化战略规划的落地需要一把手的魄力和一个有战斗力的IT组织。信息化是一个系统性工程，是一个长期优化的过程。前期投入较大但其价值的发挥却相 对滞后，不像做好一个市场能很快带来业绩的增长，这就需要各级一把手要以坚定的决心和毅力，以实际行动支持信息化建设项目，做好项目实施的人力、物力、财 力的支持和保证。

一个具备IT专业管理和技术能力、持久的变革推动能力和战斗力并时刻充满激情的IT组织是信息化战略落地的基础，也是决定信息化成功的关键要素。目前各单 位在信息化工作推动中存在的问题各有异同，但归根结底，是组织的问题。各单位要设置与集团对等的部门，加快IT组织保障体系的建设，努力做到机构、职能、 人员和责任四落实，尤其是SBU，必须尽快塑造与IT战略匹配的IT组织能力。

希望信息化能够真正成为推动华润新一轮转型的利器，成为我们在信息时代的竞争优势，不断促进管理的持续变革与完善。希望我们能够再一次未雨绸缪，走在时间 前面，为企业构筑长远价值，让华润永远生机勃勃。

a new idea(Electronic accessories site)

I was searching the Iphone accessories on ebay. Specifically I need a some connector between the iphone and the car to play music from the cell phone while driving. But there are just so many and very hard to distinguish sellers' reputation and feedback.... Need a lot of reading on their feedbacks...

So, why can we create a website(e-commerce) company to provide accessories for some famous electronic products such as smart phones, cameras, computers etc. We can provide low price by importing products directly from China supplier and save a lot of money as a web base company....

Maybe more, we can corporate with apple, Dell or HP to provide professional accessories purchasing AD on their website while customers conduct the check out process to market ourselves.

And also, this site and also be international, provide international mailings


Do not know if anyone is working on this idea or there are existing ones already. But will search how IP apply in this situation.

References

Reference for the industry research:

”Restaurant Industry 2010 Forecast,” National Restaurant Association

“More Local Restaurants Struggle as Big Chains Eat Their Lunch,” Wall

Street Journal, July 9, 2002

“Staffing Industry Economic Analysis” American Staffing Association

“Annual Economic Analysis Puzzles Through The Data and Explains the Trends”, Staffing, page 3. Summer Special Issue 2010

< http://www.americanstaffing.net/statistics/pdf/American_Staffing_2010.pdf>

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment, Hours, and Earnings From the Current Employment Statistics Survey (National),” Web Site Public Data Query, Series ID: CES6056132001, July 16, 2010.

Licensing, joint venture

Product economics/Exit

Product economics/Exit

The cost structure of the business:

Cost of entities	Cost proportion	Importance	Priority
Hire of employees	10%	3	2
System development	50%	5	1
Marketing	10%	4	3
Operational cost	20%	2	5
Customer service/support	10%	5	4

 

            The Content is the service and system that we designed to provide to our customer, it includes the tangible product as well as intangible such technical support and consulting service. The context is the overall looking of our business entity which create and provide the content. The community is the environment of our business which creates the industries and market that allow us to enter into. And finally the Value proposition includes the participation of partners in technical, customer relationship and marketing fields. We will directly reach our end customers to maintain our competence against the competitors and partners since as the end of the supply chain, we will have more control of the customer behavior, demand as well as a clear view on the market.

Summary

Still there are many other options to make this idea profitable. We can choose not to promote the system by ourselves, instead, licensing it to other vendors and charge fees. Or we can promote the system to the Enterprise resourcing planning companies and together we can create a ERP specifically in restaurant field. Either way we need to first analysis the industries and anticipate the opportunities that will or are existed within our business scope and then consider the IP issue because the intellectual property is the central value asset within our organization. With more concern on the initial investment on the business, the venture capital companies may be interested to help. They can be rewarded with preferred stock and certain amount of common stock since preferred stock holder does not have the voting right. So we can reduce the risk of not aligning with the venture capital’s business strategies. We can either give them dividend or share them certain percentage of income for a period of time. The VC will be able to realize its value by holding our stock and getting great reputation from our success.

Business Model

Business Model

            After carefully comparing existing options of business models, we decide to choose the Professional open-source model combined with Subscription business model. First, as stated before, we divide our target customer group into two parts, the potential employees and the employers.  By using professional open-source model, we give the owners and managers of a restaurant a basic function that may not be different from our competitor’s product but has a more user friendly interface, easier user instruction guide, more reliable and faster. We will not charge any money for the basic functions of this system, which means the users can simply create a user account and download it to their local computers for free. However, once they think this system is useful for their business and they want to try the premium functions after reviewing the instruction on our website. They can make a payment for the advantaged functions and pay monthly fee as well as upgrade fee. In addition, we may also consider a super-premium or a VIP program to our customers to provide them with in person installation and real time customer support.

            On the other side, the potential employers in the local labor market can also use our system to help them find favorable restaurant jobs in the local community. But we have to charge them the subscription fee either through cell phone message or phone applications. They can simply download an application to their cell phone can we can update them with all possible positions that local restaurant owners posted on our site. Also, they can go to our website, and by finishing some customer performance survey, they are eligible to use the job searching system. And once they registered in the system, the potential employee’s information will be automatically transferred to a centralized database for the employer to view and select.

Subscription:

 

Professional Open-source:

 

Venture Capital

Venture Capital

The remarkable growth of the Internet as a global commerce and information sharing resource has created the most dynamic and expansive environment for new business development in this century. Unlike the internet based companies in 1980s, the cost to start up a social media company is extremely high. A good way to gather the initial investment is seeking help from the venture capital firms. Someone may argue that venture capital firms may take too much control of the company and the funder may ta a risk of losing the leadership of the whole company once the venture capital companies entered. The fund has a responsibility to the investor to use the fund’s money where the fund management believes it has the best chance of striking gold or having an enormous return on investment. Therefore the usage of the money from VC is always limited to the founders. We, as the funders of the company may face the challenge that people form VC may come into our office and attend the meeting. We can not 100% trust them and there are many situations that these consultants may hold different opinions than us, which could cause huge dispute on some strategic business plan. However, like other sources of equity financing, venture capital offers both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that the business is not obligated to repay the money. For a start-up company, this cash flow can some time play significant role in speeding up growth. The involvement of high-profile investors may also help increase the credibility of a new business.

Even if we have the willingness to acquire the first investment from outsiders, venture capital is scarce and often difficult to obtain. Venture capitalists tend to be highly selective in choosing investments. Some will only consider investments in specific technologies, industries, or geographic areas. In fact, the larger venture capital firms typically reject more than 90 percent of the requests for funding that they receive. They evaluate the remaining requests thoroughly, and at considerable expense, before selecting a few that closely match the investors' areas of expertise and offer the best earnings potential. Therefore, in order to select the most qualified VC, we did some research on the VCs in IT field.

IMPAC

Impact Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm. It is leading venture capital in the industry of Web-to-phone system development. The company is based in Austin, Taxes.

ARCH

Arch is a company co-founded with leading scientists and entrepreneurs, concentrating on bringing to market innovations in life sciences, physical sciences, and information technology.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson

DFJ is a very famous VC in IT field. It has funded well-known technology companies including Baidu(Chinese Google), Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft), Overture (acquired by Yahoo), Skype (acquired by eBay) and Glam Media. Other notable investments include Tesla Motors, SugarCRM, Technorati, Interwoven, Meebo and SolarCity among others.

There are many other venture capitals that we can choose from. But we should set our selection criteria as such: First, it has to be a famous company with great reputation in the related field, because such VC will help us build up a good creditability within the market within a short period of time. Second, the VC must has previous experience on working with startup company in similar subjective. And third, the company has to be in the market for a long time and kept a good performance on revenue for a certain period of time.

Selecting a best matched VC is vital important to the survival of our company. Good venture capital will send consultants who are familiar with market or technology can we can talk to each other in the same table. More importantly, if the VC’s business plan can be aligned with the funders, then the deal can be acceptable, otherwise there will be substantial disputes in the future negotiation and corporation process.

Term sheet

Term sheet

Our term sheet is a summary document outlining the material terms and conditions of a business agreement with venture capitals. It is not a legal document like a contract but term sheet does specify the consents between two parties. After two parties reach the agreements on the terms, it guides legal counsel in the preparation of the contract.  In our case, term sheet will be made to use as a letter of intent to express our intention of acquiring funding from certain venture capitals. The most important part of term sheet is the consent of profit deviation. We will offer majority of the investment as preferred stock because preferred stock holder does not have the right to vote and therefore have less control on the company.

MEMORANDUM OF TERMS FOR PRIVATE

PLACEMENT OF SERIES A PREFERRED STOCK OF

Joint Scheduling

ABC Venture Group, L.P. (the “Investors”) is prepared to invest $100,000,000 in Joint Scheduling, Limited.(Our company) under the terms contained in this term sheet. With the exception of the section of this agreement relating to expenses, this term sheet is a non-binding document prepared for discussion purposes only, and the proposed investment is specifically subject to customary stock purchase agreements, legal due diligence, and other conditions precedent contained herein, all satisfactory to the Investors in their sole discretion

Issuer:                                     Joint Assistant, Software start-up, base in Oxford Ohio. The proposed transaction involves raising $100,000,000 through the issuance of series A preferred Stock.

Amount of Financing:             $100,000,000

Investors:                                ABC Venture Group, L.P.

Investment Amount:              $100,000,000

Investment Form:                  Series A Preferred Stock

                                   

Ownership:                            40% of the fully-diluted, post-investment capitalization                  

Types of securities:                 The series A preferred stock with the rights, preferences, and privileges set forth below.

Capitalization Amount:  

ABC venture capital Investment work sheet ($1 per share)

Common stock outstanding:   50,000,000 shares 50%

Preferred stock outstanding:   50,000,000 shares 50%            

Total:                                       100,000,000 shares ($100,000,000)

Use of Proceeds:                    Proceed will be used for (a) sales and marketing team salaries, (b) sales and marketing working capital and (c) employment of the sales and marketing strategy.    

Dividends:                               A preferred dividend of 8% per annum on the Preferred Stock will be payable quarterly from available cash flow, as determined by the Board. To the extent the dividend is not paid, it will accrue, but not compound. The Preferred Stock will share pari passu on an as converted basis in any dividends declared on the common stock. Any further dividends would be allocated between the common stock and preferred stockholders on a pro rata basis, treating the preferred stock on an as-if-converted basis.

Responsibilities:

Joint Assistant is responsible to generate positive income within three after launching its product to the market. It does maintain the right to partner with our venture capitals, investments from public and other resources. Joint Assistant is also liable to provide financial report to ABC as well as its budget, market plan and division of changing board. ABC should accomplish the transaction of purchasing the preferred stock within six month after signing the contract and ABC will not have the right the make decisions on election of the board members.

Social Media Context

Social Media Context

Properly take advantage of social media is very important to promote an organization and a cheaper way to marketing than traditional medias such as newspaper or TV commercials.  There are hundreds of social media tools on internet that we can use.

Smart phone network

            Smart phone network is the most important platform we should focus on since many people have changed their habits of checking email using laptop to using their cell phones. It is easier for the customers to check for any updated information on their cell phone application on 3G network. Many people have abolished their monthly SMS plan because the phone message application gives them the same service but zero cost. Using WIFI can significantly reduce the cost of cell phone monthly charge and the bandwidth of the internet data is increasing dramatically recent years. People can even talk though applications such as skype and google talk to each other instead of using their cell phone service. In short, a cell phone can play as a mini size computer and it can be all free if people truly put some research on using the applications such as jailbreak and unlock which are all legal in the United States now. With the development and promotion of android people, a lot of people are switching from Iphone system to open source operating systems, which means people can upload and download application much easier can cheaper.

            As a social media company, we should develop our own client apps on both apple and android operating systems to enable the employees can employers share information in real time.

Blog

            Blog is a popular social media too; it gives people an easier way to know our company, our product as well as our activities. Blog can be used to promote our company to everyone on the internet by simply add it on our main page. People will be interested in how other customers say about us, what our staff look are like and what things do we do. They prefer to see real pictures and videos rather than those medias used for commercialize on our blog. Also, the PHP technology and open source blog enable company to modify the interface and design of the blog align to its website which is very cool function.

Youtube

            Many video streaming websites have changed the way people think and work. It is much easier for people to know and understanding something by view and listening rather than reading. Reading a super long script on the main page of a company’s website is very boring and unrealistic. If we cannot attract people’ attention the first minute they heard about us, we will lose the opportunity to promote them with more information about our product and service. In order to align to our internet business strategy, we need to make more people know us, and give them a good image on the company. Therefore, posting videos on YouTube is choice.

Google/yahoo searching engine

            This is also a critical aspect to the success or even survival of our business. Since we are purely online business, the only way people can reach us, view our website, look at our product information and finally purchase our product is through the internet. And majority of the people will go to searching engines to find the answer to their questions and information that they concerned. Therefore this searching engine is going to be the battle field between our competitors and us. Simply saying, if we can buy the right of link with terms such as “restaurant scheduling”, “restaurant system”, “restaurant staffing” and “staffing system” and make us to be the top of the list, we can gain great advantages over our competitors. People will first click our website link and watch our product and probably stay with us in the future too.

 Facebook

            Facebook is absolutely the most popular social network now for younger generations. People make friends, post pictures and videos though Facebook.  It has millions of customers all around the world. We can use it to reach our customers, local communities and promote the company.

In addition, we can also use twitter, tweetDeck, LinkedIn, AIM and Rulla to enhance our promotion on social networks and business professionals. By establishing a good relationship with business people from other fields, we can accumulate network and customer rescores and possibly expand our business to other fields in the future.            

Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property     

            Since our business is mainly technology oriented, there will be some IP issues that we should take care of before lunching our product. Form the previous examples of other successful companies, there are two major ways to deal with intellectual property issues, innovation or licensing.          

Innovation

            It might be unfeasible for our to consider this option unless we can find venture capitals firm who wish to provide us with enough startup funding so we can hire enough and skillful technical researchers, programmers, project managers and system designers to perform brand new system design. It may take few years  to develop a new system with totally different functions than the existing ones in order to apply for design or utility patent to protect the IP of our product. The majority of the effort of protecting our IP right would be conducting prior art research which is a search from all related patent database and public papers, magazines and newspapers to find my existing ideas in relate to our design. Once the search return favorable result that we are the newest design in the market, we can apply for the patent and start working on the development phases of the new system.

            In addition to patent, we should also consider to protect our trade secret by performing safety procedures such as asking employees signing nondisclosure agreement, safety monitor and proper password and unique ID protection for the computers. The trade secret is the central IP asset of an organization that is very easy to be stolen and the organization will lost significant unless they set up enough protection methods and then the court will protect such trade secrets. Trade secret can be documents, ideas graphic and any information that is valuable for the development of company’s IP asset. Further, once the product’s development is done, we should also apply the trade mark to the product. Give it a name and a logo. Together with all the designs and IPs attach to the product, we can build up a trade dress which can be used as protection as long as the product is commercialized in the market. 

            Since patents and trade mark all have limitation of time to be protected by the government. We should consider promoting the new product to the market as soon as possible. There are also several ways  to market the new system. We can either purchase an existing company to use their resources, reputation and customer resource or build up a new brand for the product and market by our self. And we can also licensing it to other vendors can get loyalty fees for certain percentage of their sales.

Licensing

            This method does not require us to develop our own product but has great limitation during our business processes. By licensing from other developers, we can reach an agreement to market their product and pay them a certain amount of licensing fee. The benefit of this option is that it can significantly save the initial investment of the company. There is no need to hire a large number of developer and the company can start doing business much faster because it skips the phase of development. But there are limitations for this option too. First is that the licenser can put control to put business. They have the ability of blocking us from our customers by refusing licensing the right to sell their product to us. And if that happen, we will lose the whole supply chain and we will have nothing to sell to our customers and go out of business thereby. Another disadvantage is that since we do not have the control of the central logic and technology of the system, it is very hard for us to provide maintenance to our customers and provide them the updates.

IP is so important to the survival of an organization in today’s business world. Intellectual property, in another word is the source of value chain of a company. It is even more important to conduct thorough and complete due diligence into all aspects of a company's operations including, notably, the intellectual property assets. Properly secure the right of using this asset can give business organization significant advantage in competing in the market and retain revenues.

Concept

Concept Generation

                After carefully research the market and current competitors’ systems, we found that there are still two major areas that we still have the opportunity to be dominate in. First one is the communication channel within organization and communication between organization and local community/labor market. We proposed several concept to reach our thoughts. And we rate these concepts and select them on the basis of technical resource, budget and market requests.

Basic logic:

i.                     All the restaurant who registered as a member will be able to create a profile such as a personal profile on facebook

ii.                   All registered employee will be given an invisible profile that has all his personal information but can only see by himself and the recruiters.

iii.                 Restaurant profile is open to both employees and public, employees who registered to have been working with the restaurant will be granted the right to leave feedback for employment experience and public can leave feedback for restaurant in general any time

iv.                 System can be used to search restaurants and people on name, location, size, type, price, rating and ranking criteria. 

Specific functions that the system should provide

1.       Scheduling part

A.      The system should be able to cancel/make appointment

B.      The system will return all free slack for employees(employers) to pick

C.       The scheduling logic should be able to be modified by employer

D.      System can send the notification to employees and employers

E.      Save logs and also transaction on central database

F.       Remote control and VPN access

G.      The client access should be available on all platforms: email, messenger,sms,etc

2.       Labor selection part

A.      Employer can post job positions on their profile

B.      Local job hunters can view the information including restaurant type, employer, feedback from other employees and available shifts and apply for the position

C.       The information/resume and feedback from previous of the applicant will be viewed by employer

3.       Local residence communication

A.      Local residence can view feedback of restaurant and it promotions 

B.      Local residence can leave feedback and post pictures on the restaurant profile

C.       System will filter any unhealthy content during the process

4.       Digital connections

A.      Restaurant can post picture/video/audio and blogs on their profile. Their profile is editable to align the design of their website.

B.      The profile can be shared to other social networks such as twitter and facebook

C.       Central server enable other functions such as clock in, clock out and location service for the employers.

D.      Central server also provide common restaurant functions such as take order, check out and calculate pricing to the customers as additional package.

E.      Special device like a Ipad to make the order process much easier and the system will be enabled on that device. The device function can also be available for Ipad or Iphone after downloading a certain application.

F.       When a customer is in a restaurant and open his smartphone, the application on his cellphone will automatically inform him where he is and what are some famous dishes in this restaurant as well as other information if he choose to view.

Concept selection

            Although fulfilling the functionality that restaurant can build communication channel with local market and labor force is important, the current and most important functionality that we are trying to accomplish is to make sure that the internal management requirements can be met and employee’s schedule cost can be reduced.  In additional, the employee’s communication functionality has technical constraint since in order to accomplish this functionality there are very high customization and communication device programing development fees. For example, if the employees use different cell phone operation systems such as google, iphone and android, the programing language are totally different. Therefore, based on the reality and cost/risk analysis, we decide to first focus on the basic goals to reduce the restaurant’s cost and implement the additional functions in future update package.

We have put the essential and technically difficult to accomplished concept into a concept selection table for further analysis: (the concept will be represented as number plus letter from the list in the concept generation secion)

Criteria	1E	2C	3C		4D	5F
Ease of design	-	-	+		+	0
Ease of handling	+	-	+		0	-
Does metering	0	0	0		-	0
Load handling	0	-	+		-	0
Programing  possibility	+	+	-		-	+
Plus	1	1	3	1			1
Same	2	1	1	1			3
Minus	1	3	1	3			1
N et	1	-2	2	-2			0
	Yes	No	Yes	No			yes

By comparing these few additional concepts, we believe that customer may concern more on the availability of cell phone applications because that is the easiest and common way people use for communication. And they will be interested in promoting customers with their new products and promotions through cell phone. Therefore we choose 5F which the cell phone communication app for better communication between restaurant and their customers. Also, from our own perspective, a centralize database and server and add great advantage to our product and customers would be willing to use one single vender for all their IT application because it is easier to manage and upgrade. And I believe that the function that server can provide to customer for their common tasks will give us an opportunity to charge a premium and finally expand our business to restaurant general management market in the future. Therefore we will also keep 1E and 3c which are the development of database and server.

                In the real world, nothing can be perfect, and with more competition, we ought to put more time and efforts to focus on our competitive advantage which is the digital restaurant system. We will need to focus on moving restaurant business to the digital media field and finally build up the empire of online restaurant community.