Densification of business processes and creation of competitiveness through information systems

Recently, information systems are being extensively used by many companies, and the IT that forms these systems is rapidly evolving and becoming commodified. Therefore, it is expected that the more a company's competitiveness depends on information systems, the more difficult it will become for other companies to maintain competitiveness with imitations. Even in this type of business environment, within an industry, the leading companies that maintain a high competitiveness level are increasing their competitiveness by “densifying” their business processes. In this study, by analyzing the historical process of densification, we demonstrate that leading companies who have long had a competitive edge maintained it first by increasing competitiveness through the introduction of latest IT on the input side while, at the same time, multi-effective usage of the accumulated data. Second, these companies took the lead on historically interconnected issues and continuously reformed their information systems to “densify” their business processes.