• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.15-26
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• 2009

The internet has dramatically changed a way of business management and competition in the business environment. Especially, it stimulated not only to evolve online floral distribution service but also to change a phase of competition among floral retail stores in industry. And that also led to keen competition among IT service providers as well. This study is to examine how floral retail stores have been evolved and competed with the radical situation of the floral distribution industry through IT service in the aspect of business and information technology. In addition, the Typhoon Positioning Strategy(TPS), a strategy for the IT service positioning, is introduced from IT service provider's perspective. For IT service providers to create high business value and continuous service providing, IT service should be positioned on the customers' "core business" and developed to the level of "solution." The Typhoon Positioning Strategy(TPS) is a strategy for the IT service positioning, indicating that IT service should be positioned according to a Business Process-Service model with the consideration of business development direction, IT service trend, and user's IT capability. That is, IT service providers should find out customers' "core business" area first to provide a right IT service to the company, and the IT service provided should meet to the level of business solution. The capability of the IT solution users is also an important factor to be considered for the advanced IT service. There are four principles of the Typhoon Positioning Strategy(TPS). Principle 1) IT service provided should be an IT solution Map suitable for customer business processes. Principle 2) IT service provided should be able to support customer core business. Principle 3) IT service provided should be a business solution. Principle. 4) IT service provided should be applied differently according to the level of customer's IT capability.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.21-33
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• 2010

The ICT(information & communication technology) led to a dramatic change of floral distribution service, a phase of competition between wholesales and retail stores, and distribution channels in floral industry. It was expected that a role of the intermediaries in this industry would have reduced due to the improvement of transaction process by ICT. However, the ICT made to overcome a regional limit of the floral retail distribution service leading to an increase in sales and enlargement of the stores. And even it made possible to bring out another type of intermediaries such as private associations. This case study focuses on what kinds of efforts the floral wholesale distributors have made to enable a distribution process more smoothly between the wholesale distributors and retail stores through the information system, and what the failure factors in adopting the information system have been. This paper is also to examine how the wholesale distributors have changed themselves to gain dominant positions in distribution channels. As a result of the study, it was found that the intermediaries mostly failed in successfully achieving the distribution channel innovation through the information system because of several main reasons. FLOMARKET Inc. tried to innovate a distribution channel to obtain high quality goods through consolidating a wholesale distribution market in that segregated both floral joint market from free markets. after implementing the information system with consideration of the failure factors, FLOMARKET Inc. was able to minimize goods in stock and make a major purchase of various goods. In addition, it made a possible pre-ordering process and an exact calculation of purchasing goods so they could provide their products with market price in real time, which helped for the company to gain credits from their customers. Also, FLOMARKET Inc. established the information system which well suited to its business stage in order to deal with a rapidly changing distribution environment. It's so obvious that the transaction processing system of FLOMARKET Inc. definitely helped to share information among traders more seamlessly and smoothly in realtime, standardize goods, and make a transaction process clearer. Besides, the transaction information helped the wholesale distributors and retail stores to make more strategic decisions in their business because through the system they enabled to gather the marketing intelligence information more easily and convenient. If we understand that the floral distribution market is characterized by the low IT- based industry, it's worth to examine a case study proving that the information system actually increases the productivity of the transaction process in the floral industry.