Management Information system for product differentiation:

If we look at how the industry has progressed in past century i.e. from Early Mechanization to Steam Power & Railways to Electrical & Heavy Engineering to Ford Type Mass Production to Information & Communication to mass customization to Holistic (Cook 2000) we can infer that as companies become more global the complexities of managing and delivering, quality and on-time at the right cost become an important issue of the millennium. Through his competitive forces model, Michael Porter tries to convey that product differentiation is key to a company’s success. Information systems can be leveraged to come out with unique highly differentiated products. This is important since many me too (Kotler 2003) with their low cost advantage can sweep the market in no time. So products or services have to be easily distinguishable and at the same time they shouldn’t be easily duplicable. Ulph and Vulkan (2000) propose that consumers differ with respect to their most desired products, and firms c...