Best of breed
| Best of breed |
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| See also |
Best of breed (BoB) is a product or service best in its class. The company may want to obtain best of breed equipment, software, patent. It can give competitive advantage, because customers usually prefer the best quality products and services[1]. However, there are also downsides of having best of breed products. What is interesting, this term is used more often in IT more than in other economic fields.
Advantages and disadvantages of BoB
As it was said earlier, there may occur many different approaches about using best of breed products and services, because there are some advantages and disadvantages, everything depends on what is crucial for the specific company.
- best of breed products are usually expensive. Before making purchase the company should analyze potential cost and benefits[2]. In many cases buying best of breed product won't be as profitable as it looked at first glance,
- often high cost goes for high quality, so the company should consider BoB if it wanhs to be associated with quality,
- the best of breed products often are not compatible with older ones. If the company buys new equipment for production line, there can be a problem with compatibility. In case of software, interfaces often don't work as supposed. Before purchase the company should analyze compatibility of the products,
- best of breed products may be highly desired by customers, that's way sometimes it's very hard to buy them, so because of limited purchase, they may become a luxury good. Hence, sometimes it is necessary to wait a long time after making the order[3],
- if the company offers best of breed products, it makes the impression of better than the others, and, consequently it's better placed on a competitive market.
- if the necessity of any kind of merger appears, it is easier to integrate the systems between companies which are on the similar technological level. Even if only one of them uses BoB, their infrastructure helps with formal issues[4].
Best of breed systems
Then it comes to IT systems - best of bread means, that the system is created of individually designed components - applications[5]. Each one has its own base with data. In big companies, or those with numerous departments, where everyone has to use the best quality programme, servers are overflowing with memory of so many databases. There's a solution for this: integrated systems[6]. There are numerous of applications providing similar solutions - so the market is highly competitive. In integrated systems approach, the company resigns from the best quality (BoB) of the programmes in favour of getting many applications in one system with just one database.
Footnotes
- ↑ Light, B., Holland, C. P., Wills, K., 2001, p. 216-224
- ↑ Constantinos S. 1999, p. 2-4
- ↑ Light B., Holland Ch. P., Kelly S., Willis K., 2000, p.2-7
- ↑ Light B., Holland Ch. P., Kelly S., Willis K., 2000, p.2-7
- ↑ Hermann S. A., Pharm. D., 2010, p. 1-3
- ↑ Burchi F., Fanzo J., Frison E., 2010, p.358-373
References
- Andrews S., (2012). A ‘Best-of-Breed’ approach for designing a fast algorithm for computing fixpoints of Galois Connections, Information Sciences, Vol. 295, 20 Feb. 2015, 633-649
- Burchi F., Fanzo J., Frison E., (2010). The Role of Food and Nutrition System Approaches in Tackling Hidden Hunger, Public Health 2011, 8(2), 358-373
- Constantinos S. (1999). Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Organizational Key Factors for Successful Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, AMCIS 1999 Proceedings. 276, 2-4
- Ferrández O., South B. R., Shen Sh., Friedlin F. J., Samore M. H., Meystre S. M., (2013). BoB, a best-of-breed automated text de-identification system for VHA clinical documents, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 20, Issue 1, Jan. 2013, 77–83
- Hermann S. A., Pharm. D., (2010). Best-of-breed versus integrated systems, American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, Volume 67, Issue 17, 1 Sep. 2010, 1-3
- Light B., Holland Ch. P., Kelly S., Willis K., (2000). Best of Breed IT Strategy: An Alternative to Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, ECIS 2000 Proceedings. 180, 2-7
- Light, B., Holland, C. P., Wills, K. (2001). ERP and best of breed: a comparative analysis, Business Process Management Journal, 7(3). 216-224
Author: Anna Włodarczyk
