- Value Chain Analysis is a process which analyzes all the activities carried out by a business to gauge how much they actually contribute to the goals of the business. The results of the analysis allow a business to categorize activities as either primary or support. Primary activities are those that contribute directly to the core goal of the business. Support activities are those that, while important, are secondary in their contribution towards the business' goals. The latter may be out-sourced while the former is typically handled by the business itself.
- MIS stands for Management Information System. An MIS deals with the accumulation and organization of the financial data of a company, especially transactions. An MIS can aid greatly in a value chain analysis as it shows relevant and current data on the profits or losses generated or incurred by each activity. On the basis of this analysis, a business can then decide whether to modify, outsource, or entirely terminate an activity.
- BPR is an acronym for Business Process Re-engineering. In layman's terms, this is a process by which a business redesigns its processes and activities so as to generate higher profit and sales and cut down on inefficient, redundant or downright activities. A business may choose to undergo BPR after seeing the results of a Value Chain Analysis. Many businesses that undergo BPR will often resort to downsizing.
- Since MIS is a very important component of Value Chain Analysis, a business must ensure that the data is accurate as well as comprehensive. This can be achieved with data warehousing and data mining. Data warehousing is the task of combining immense volumes of data in one place. Data mining is the process of determining how all that data correlates to each other.
- DFD is a Data Flow Diagram that will represent in graphs the results of the data mining. The data dictionary is basically an index of all the data compiled during data warehousing with a location map and short description of each entry.