Information and Technology Management (ITM): Competitive Advantage through Customer Relationship: The Case of an Automobile Dealership

Introduction

Strategic management is constantly passing through changes in order to attend to new demands related to the uncertainties the market has been imposing. This way, the present treatise approaches such uncertainties – both quantitatively and qualitatively – which encase the strategy of a company within customer relationship and competitive value generation, through a model based on Compensatory Fuzzy Logic (CFL) that frames up mathematically the classical SWOT analysis, added of Objectives and Actions (SWOT-OA). This framework based on CFL is translated in Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, Objectives and Actions, which turns the linguistically-expressed knowledge of specialists into a widening-associative quantification of the Boolean logic, allowing the researchers and readers of this study to analyze the importance of each of its strategic variables.

According to Mintzberg and Quinn (2001) the strategy is characterized as a corporate transformation process, subjected to usual fixing. Due to this diagnosis, it is important to establish connections between strategic integration links and advance into a predictability of their behaviour, for according to Bonabeau (2002), predicting the unpredictable depends a lot on emerging phenomena formed amid the interaction of different organizational levels. This kind of situation instigated the writing of the present treatise, i.e. taking in account situations that are not standards represented in the strategic planning, and for this reason the following question was defined: How is it possible to generate competitive value through costumer relationship in a car part-seller company?