Excursion 40

MRail's SHARP Resources

This is a great time to review the discussion about Resources in Chapter 5. Do you remember the factors that determine whether resources can create value? Have you taken that into account as you build your OBMC? Do you have SHaRP Resources to support your business model? In the product based OBMC for MRail, the rail cars and relationships are not hard to copy, rare, or precious. In the new OBMC, the engineering capabilities themselves may not be SHaRP, but they have the potential to create new SHaRP resources in the form of new design and utility patents, as well as products features that are not available from any other venture. Similarly data presentation skills may not seem SHaRP, but the data presentation skills for the new MRail OBMC build on the unique knowledge that Farritor and his team already had about the railroads key needs. A key component for the long-term MRail business model could well be real-time web-enabled data services that provide a dashboard of information for a rail operator’s maintenance and logistics managers. The ability to monitor track quality in near-real time would be SHaRP indeed.