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Wholesale Industry Business Reference Architecture

Business capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps for the wholesale industry.

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  • Leadership requires a unified and validated view of retail business capabilities that help CIOs and wholesale leadership accelerate the strategy design process and align initiatives, investments, and strategies.
  • The business and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic impact and value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central to organizational priorities and has many benefits. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the organization’s direction, but more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes, recent trends in distribution, and unlocking direct value.

Impact and Result

  • Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting your wholesale distribution capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between organizational and IT strategies.
  • Apply Level 2 business reference architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your wholesale and distribution operations.
  • Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities and prioritize projects.

Wholesale Industry Business Reference Architecture Research & Tools

1. Accelerate the strategy design process

Leverage a validated view of wholesale business capabilities to realize measurable top-line business outcomes and unlock direct value.

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The Wholesale Industry Guide Business Reference Architecture

Business Capability Maps, Value Streams, and Strategy Maps for the Wholesale Distribution Industry

As an IT leader you must arm yourself with industry-specific insight

Info-Tech's Industry Research, Advisory Services, and Executive Roundtables will give you everything you need to stay ahead of the curve.

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Icon of a strategy board.

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Icon of a dashboard.

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IT Strategy & Alignment, Reference Architectures & Value Systems

Understand the capabilities and focus areas required to meet your industry’s needs and enable value creation.

Top Trends Affecting Your Industry

Identify resource, process, and environmental trends impacting your industry. Implement strategies to mitigate specific risks and take advantage of all relevant opportunities.

Industry Benchmarking

Reveal the true state of your IT services, processes, spend, and staffing levels to align your priorities and resources.

Benefit from peer data to get a reference point for how well you stack up.

Software Selection to Meet Industry Needs

Arm yourself with everything you need to provide the right solutions to meet the needs of your business stakeholders.

Contact Eric Cabral at ecabral@infotech.com for more information.

Analyst Perspective

In the age of disruption, IT must end misalignment & enable value realization.

An industry reference architecture helps accelerate your strategy design process and enhances IT’s ability to align people, processes, and technology with key business priorities.

  • A wholesale capability business map is a generic value chain independent of any system.
  • It covers all core level 1 and level 2 wholesale business capability components, from strategy planning to purchasing, distributing, and selling products.
  • The capability map leverages best practices cumulated by working with leading wholesalers.
  • It can be used, for example, in process design, operational analysis, due diligence, channel alignment, and wholesale process performance management; it serves as an IT architectural lens to enable retail entry transformation.

Wholesale strategy requires a unified and validated view of business capabilities that aligns initiatives, investments, and strategies to provide value to clients and stakeholders.

Photo of Rahul Jaiswal, Principal Research Director, Retail & Wholesale, Info-Tech Research Group.

Rahul Jaiswal
Principal Research Director, Retail & Wholesale
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge
  • You are a CIO, head of EA, or chief architect who needs to improve the organization’s understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support them.
  • The organization wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using architecture to inform better its IT governance, stakeholder management, and IT strategy capabilities.
  • The organization needs to validate and execute strategic initiatives by using this blueprint to understand how the organization creates value and the underlying capabilities and processes.
Common Obstacles
  • Businesses don’t know where or how to begin or how to engage the right people, model the business, and drive the value of business architecture.
  • Business and IT often speak in their own languages without a holistic and integrated view of missions, strategies, goals, processes, and projects.
  • Business and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.
Info-Tech’s Approach
  • Build your organization’s capability map by defining the organization’s value stream and validating the wholesale industry reference architecture.
  • Leverage business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization’s key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.
  • Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, applications, and technology support of key capabilities.
  • Adopt capability-based strategy planning by the ongoing identification and road mapping of capability gaps.
Info-Tech Insight

Establishing an industry-specific reference architecture is vital and promotes organizational priorities. It’s essential to understanding, modeling, and connecting the operating environment and the organization’s direction, but more significantly, to empowering measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlocking direct value.

Reference Architecture Framework

Overarching Insight

Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central and has many benefits to organizational priorities. It's critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the enterprise, and more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line business outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.

Determine your organizational priority.

Many organizational priorities are dependent on an understanding of how the organization creates value and the organization's capabilities and processes.

Examine organizational opportunities through the lens of business, information/data, applications & technology.

Your understanding of your organization's business capabilities, processes (rules & logic), information/data, and architecture will identify organizational opportunities to create value through reduced costs or increased revenues and services.

Follow Info-Tech's methodology to enable organizational outcomes and unlock direct value.

Your approach indicates the scope of your modernization initiatives.

Build your organization's capability map by defining the organization's value stream and validating the industry reference architecture.

Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.

Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, applications, and technology support of key capabilities.

Sustain capability-based strategy planning through ongoing identification and roadmapping of capability gaps.

Logo for Info-Tech Research Group.Logo for iTRG.

Pinwheel diagram of value in the industry context. At the center is 'Value (Revenue, Margin, Assets)' surrounded by a cycle of '1. Build', '2. Define', '3. Assess & Prioritize' and '4. Sustain'. Surround that are categories 'Business', 'Information/Data', 'Applications', and 'Technology'. On the wings of the pinwheel are 'Governance & Risk', 'Business Context', 'Business Strategy', 'IT Strategy', 'Innovation', 'IT Budget', 'Digital Transformation', 'Core Application Rationalization & Modernization', 'IT Service Mgmt', 'Requirements', 'Data', and 'Org Design/ Operating Model'. The entire pinwheel exists within the 'Industry Context'.

Industry Overview: Wholesale

The wholesale industry sells products of various types directly to business customers and retailers. Some wholesalers provide or ship the purchased goods. In addition, they sometimes deal with partners, creating a complex supply and delivery chain.

Wholesalers range from small shops to large global companies across all verticals, such as AmerisourceBergen (pharmaceuticals) and Associated Grocers (supermarkets).

Consumers can quickly and easily shift what they purchase and where they purchase from. Therefore, enterprises must understand shifting consumer patterns to manage inventory and store location.

Wholesalers purchase products from manufacturers or suppliers. They then sell products to a variety of retailers. Their value is in providing inventory for retailers at higher fulfilment speed and lower overhead than if the retailer bought directly from a supplier and warehoused the product before sale.

In August 2022, total wholesaler sales in the United States amounted to an estimated value of almost 700 billion US dollars. This represents an increase of about 100 billion US dollars year-over-year.

(Source: Statista 2022)
Value Chain for the Wholesale Industry with 'Strategy Planning' at the top, followed by 'Purchase Product', 'Distribute Product', and 'Sell Product'.
Figure above: Value Chain for the Wholesale Industry

Business Value Realization

Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:

  • Profit generation: The revenue generated from a business capability with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
  • Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
  • Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies.
  • Customer and market reach: The improved reach and insights of the business in existing or new markets.

Business Value Matrix

Business Value Matrix with four quadrants defined by an x-axis between 'Improved capabilities' and 'Financial benefit' and a y-axis between 'Inward' and 'Outward'. The four quadrants are 'Profit generation (outward, financial benefit)', 'Cost reduction (inward, financial benefit)', 'Service enablement (inward, improved capabilities)', and 'Customer and market reach (outward, improved capabilities)'.

Value, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without business capabilities

Break down your business goals into strategic and achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and business capabilities.

Example strategy map for determining business capabilities. The first column is 'Business Goals & Outcomes' listing four Business Goals, two of which are color-coded similarly. The second column is 'Business Initiatives' with Initiatives 1 through 10, each color-coded to match the business goal they help to achieve. The third and fourth columns are 'Level 1 / Level 2 Business Capabilities' with capabilities grouped by 'Value Stream', each of which are color-coded to business goals and the business initiatives that create or improve them.

Wholesale business capability map

Business capability map defined…

In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map.

A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how. Business capabilities:

  • Represent stable business functions.
  • Are unique and independent of each other.
  • Typically will have a defined business outcome.

A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.

Wholesale business capability map with the wholesale industry value chain as column headers, 'Strategic Planning', 'Purchase Product', 'Distribute Product', 'Sell Product', and row headers 'Defining', 'Shared', and 'Enabling'.

Glossary of Key Concepts

A business reference architecture consists of a set of models to provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical techniques and terms used in developing these models are:

Term/Concept Definition
Industry Value Chain A high-level analysis of how the industry creates value for the consumer as an overall end-to-end process.
Business Capability Map The primary visual representation of the organization’s key capabilities. This model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions.
Industry Value Streams The specific set of activities an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer.
Strategic Objectives A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans.
Industry Strategy Map A visualization of the alignment between the organization’s strategic direction and its key capabilities.
Capability Assessments Based on people, process, information, and technology, a heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability.
Capability An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve.
(Source: The Open Group, 2009)

Business capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps for the wholesale industry.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Get the help you need in this 2-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Model
  • Call 1: Introduce Info-Tech’s Industry business reference architecture methodology.
  • Call 2: Define and create value streams.
  • Call 3: Model Level 1 business capability maps.
  • Call 4: Map value streams to business capabilities.
  • Call 5: Model Level 2 business capability maps.
  • Call 6: Create a strategy map.

Guided Implementation 2: Drive
  • Call 1: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework.
  • Call 2: Review capability assessment map(s).
  • Call 3: Discuss and review the prioritization of key capability gaps and plan the next steps.

Author

Rahul Jaiswal

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