Company Background
Discuss about the Strategic Report of a Mobile Application for U-market.
Mobile business applications are revolutionizing the world of business. Along with Business to Customer (B2C) applications, Business to Business (B2B) are picking up the pace in this competitive mobile application market place. A large number of new mobile application launches increasingly produce a competitive environment for application owners as well as entrepreneurs. Plus, free and low priced applications are getting marketing costs and profit margins. (Haugestad, 2015)
A mobile application (app), UMarket is a direct market place for buyers and suppliers providing Business to Business (B2B) relation. In B2B domain, essentially the services and products of one business are marketed to other business. For instance, businesses executing economic exchange are services providing and resource integrating enterprise that holds common objective of value creation which is referred as B2B. (Vargo and Lusch, 2011)
With the aim to get rid of distributor between manufacturers and retailers, the app has been developed. The target group of the app is wholesalers and retailers. It is basically a platform for suppliers and buyers for finding best products at best prices quickly and easily. The app is designed for small screen. Plus, the architectural design of UMarket is very simple as it has simple navigation. And, the app focuses on consistency means it has same design in iOS and android version. . The category of the app discloses may confuse users as it showcases food and beverage. However, it is packed with other flavors too.
Stakeholders can be renowned in three attributes of relationship-legitimacy, power and urgency. Power refers to capacity to enforce authority on the relationship; legitimacy means a comprehensive assumption that the acts are appropriate and desirable; and urgency is founded on criticality and sensitivity. (Mitchell, as cited in Panteli et al. 2010) Stakeholder basically is any individual or group who can influence or is influenced by the success of any company’s goal. (Freeman, as cited in Matuleviciene and Stravinskien, 2015). The main stake holders of UMarket are founders and clients. Founders take the responsibility as a sponsor while clients are the users of the app who either buy or sell their products through the app. Stakeholders of the mobile app are associated with the same guiding objective for developing and improving customer-centric user experiences as a buyer or seller.
“Umarket help customers discover new trails for successful business”. This statement helps Umarket to act as a compass and plan to fulfill the company’s prospective. One of the research mentions that mission statement provides a sense of the organization’s purpose and direction and the statement is the beginning point of each strategic initiative. A clear mission statement of an organization supports to make it realistic and achieve coherent goals. (Darbi, 2012)
Key Stakeholders
The vision of UMarket therefore is the key to craft a powerful and sustainable connection with both team as well as clients. As this vision has been crafted with right intention, it can help the company align the effort and focus on achieving the objective that is develop as the best platform for buying and selling products at best price quickly and easily.
The major objectives of the app are to provide convenience, easy accessibility and better engagement with clients. Also, UMarket offers a chance to buy or sell the products at best price quickly and easily. Likewise, the main goal of the app is to gain profitability presenting best products at best prices.
Besides, personalization is a crucial concern of the app. Unlike a website, users do not need to sign in every time they want to access their account. This app helps users to automatically sign in just within few tap of the buttons and provides instant access to their personalized page. This app helps users to search for the products they desire for, quickly and easily log into their account, quickly and easily log in, review their past order history and sell or buy their products quickly.
Business Drivers: Our business is driven by many drivers but some of the important one’s are as follows:
Technology: U market application is a market place for buyers and suppliers to trade, providing them B2B experience. Our service provider can be referred to Software as a Service (SaaS). Technology creates an impact on business outcome, using the innovative technology we built an application which is Bug-free, fast and easy to use.
Services: We are trying to create a win-win situation for purchasers and suppliers meaning that the customer can get the same quality product at a lower price and at the same time small businesses or start-ups gets a chance to grow in the market.
To increase the consumers downloading our application we offer it for free. User can access our service at any time and from any place.
Marketing Strategy: Few people find mobile applications valuable & exciting whereas others find it inconvenient. Considering the fact that people carry different attitude towards using mobile applications, we will reach targeted audience using social media marketing tools. Best of all, Ad’s on most of the platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are pay-per click. We will plan our marketing campaign in three phases i.e. pre-launch, launch and post launch.
Vision and Mission Statement
Customer centric approach: U-Market enables innovative service that can ensure enhanced personal experience and satisfaction. We have two different interface for buyers and suppliers respectively.
We believe on simplicity and focused on user experience.
Key business processes- the key business processes with respect to the UMarket will be similar to the other types of the business processes. Thus, the business process will include the marketing (retailer and wholesaler strategies); employee satisfaction; process improvement, quality improvement and change management, financial and capital management; acquisition of the retailer and the wholesalers; technology management and accounting management; product development. All the business processes work together for the service/product delivery.
- Key internal issues- the major internal issues are an effect on the organization’s size, technical problems, information sharing, and investment costs. The investment costs arise from training the operating personnel, software development and its maintenance, additional hardware development and maintenance. The B2B participation has led to the emergence of the fear that it provides an open window to the competitors regarding the operational capabilities and the pricing structures. When discussing the technologies that are existing within the organizations, issues regarding the compatibility between the partners will rise. The weak market positions and limited financial resources, the sophisticated infrastructure of the information technology are the several issues that arise with the small business entities that would like to adopt the B2B e-commerce (?obaziewicz 2013).
- Key external issues- the major external issues are: deal pricing in bulk, maintaining the client relationships, a shopping cart which is customizable, shipping solutions, sale companion times, and transactions in large numbers, and user-friendly experience, establishment of advanced logic, different areas to be fulfilled (Janita and Chong 2013).
Mobile application is based off the common languages for scripting i.e. C,C++, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. We have also used some instruments that are accessible for creating applications like PhoneGap. Photoshop was used to make alluring GUI (Graphical User Interface).
The 3 future status-
- The mobile app that is exclusively used for the purpose of B2B operations will be in future be more integrative with one another and also with the external data resources. This will lead to the technology executives to take further steps and ensure the proper security and operation (Bal 2013).
- The mobile applications will help companies to connect and share information regarding the inventory levels and the order status to the customer and the employees. Thus these applications will become far more useful in future and it can be seen to create an open ecosystem.
- It can be predicted that the in future the course may go beyond the current roles and this will also include the typical business processes like diving into the sale analytics, checking the product data, procuring the products, delving into the data of sales analytics. In future the B2B application will depend much more on the user instructions (Bal 2013).
Tangible- the tangible benefits are: cost savings, increases productivity, increased overall business efficiencies. The tangible benefits will arise majorly from the benefits that the application will provide to the targeted business partners and the associated results.
Intangible- The mobile application will provide a customized approach for the wholesalers and the retailers to judge the unique selling position, functionality and the design of the application. This will help the customers to engage with the concerned company in a much better way without any hassle. One of the biggest intangible benefits is the increase in the brand equity (Rogers and Clark 2016).
References
Bal, S.N., 2013. Mobile web–enterprise application advantages. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing, 2(2), pp.36-40.
Darbi, W P K., 2012. Of mission and vision statements and their potential impact on employee behavior and attitudes: The case of a public but profit-oriented tertiary institution. International Journal of Business and Social Science, Vol. 3, no. 14.
Haugestad, R, 2015. Innovation strategy for B2B mobile apps: a value-centric approach (Master’s thesis, Norwegian University of Life Sciences).
Janita, I. and Chong, W.K., 2013. Barriers of b2b e-business adoption in Indonesian SMEs: A Literature Analysis. Procedia Computer Science, 17, pp.571-578.
?obaziewicz, M., 2013. Effectiveness of business process management in B2B model. Polish Journal of Management Studies, 8.
Matuleviciene, M and Stravinskien, J, 2015, The Importance of Stakeholders for Corporate Reputation. Inzinerine Ekonomika-Engineering Economics, Vol. 26, no. 1, 75–83
Panteli, N, Pitsillides, B, Pitsillides, A and Samaras, G, 2010, An E-healthcare Mobile Application: A Stakeholders’ Analysis, University of Bath, School of Management.
Rogers, B. and Clark, L., 2016. CABS: a conceptual model for context-aware B2B sales applications. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 10(1), pp.50-66.
Vargo, S L and Lusch, R F, 2011, It’s all B2B… and beyond: Toward a systems perspective of the market, Industrial marketing management, Vol. 40, no. 2, pp.181-187.