Introducing Time based Competitive Advantage in IT Sector with Simulation

Incompletion of projects in time leads to project failure which is the major dilemma of the software industry. Different strategies are used to gain a competitive advantage over competitors in business. In software perspective, time is an incredibly critical factor, software products should be delivered in time to gain competitive advantage. However, at a halt, there is no such strategy that covers time perspective. In this paper, a time-based strategy for software products is introduced. More specifically, the importance of time-based strategy by analyzing its associated factors is highlighted using simulations. Keywords—Business strategy; competitive advantage; timebase; a competitor; simulation; software industry


INTRODUCTION
A strategy is responsible for designing plan of actions and assigning required resources to achieve long-term goals of an organization [1].The strategy is viewed as the process of creating a unique and valuable position by means of a set of activities in a way that creates synergistic pursuit of the objectives of a firm [2].In terms of its importance, strategy helps to gain substantial advantages and it is considered as a vital source for generating favorable situations between the firm and its competitors [3], [4].The strategy is a pattern of resource allocation that enables firms to maintain or improve their performances [5].Identify trends and opportunities in the future.The firm can strive to gain competitive advantage over its competitors only when it maintains a difference with competitors [3].Entire visualization of the firm is created by business strategy.The business strategy describes the internal and external condition of firm required for competing with competitors.It is crucial that goals and missions of organization would be clear to everyone.The strategy provides help to stable firm's goal.
Since the 1980s, competitive advantage is the most significant concerns of business administration.In a business perspective, competitive advantage is described as an attribute and unique features through which an organization outperforms its competitors for the targeted market [6].Researchers have different opinions about the concept of competitive advantage and widely studied in [3], [7]- [9] to analyze the firm's performance.Competitive advantages can take a number of perspectives; these can include organizational structure and process [10], knowledge and capital derived from employees [11], all of which constitute resources residing internally within the firm.There are three basic categories of competitive strategies [12] that can be applied by companies in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantages: low-cost leadership, Differentiation, and focus.The differentiation and cost leadership are two major strategies to compete with opponent firms [6], [13]- [15].Finally, by forming a business strategy a firm can achieve competitive advantage competitive advantage and eventually realize more about their current and future situations.
In time-based competition, time is a critical source and most important factor for gaining competitive advantage in a worldwide context."Time-based competition will be the rule of the day" [16].Strategic timing is the primary choice of the firms, to become the first, second or last move to the market [17].The purpose of the time-based strategy is to trim down the time for the completion of the task."Time-based Competitors are offering greater varieties of products and services, at lower costs and in less time than are their more pedestrian competitors" [18].Researchers, practitioners, and companies demonstrated through case studies, surveys and empirical approaches that the business and IT (Information Technology) performances are tightly coupled [19]- [27] and enterprises cannot be competitive if their business and IT strategies are not aligned.Time consideration in IT firms is even more curious.According to the Chaos report, only 16.2% projects can complete on time, remaining may fail due to the delay in completion time [28].As time is a very critical factor in the production of software, in this paper, a time-based strategy for software products is introduced.Multiple factors associated with time perspective are identified and finally, the positive and negative effects of these factors are analyzed using simulations so that importance of time-based factors can be www.ijacsa.thesai.orghighlighted.Time base simulations will provide a systematic view, when and how to launch a software product to get the maximum competitive advantage either it should be in time, pre-time or post time launch.
Remaining paper is structured as follows: Section II comprises extensive background knowledge.Section III discusses the importance of time-based competitive advantage.Simulation results are described in Section IV.Section V offers a conclusion and future work.

II. BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
Business competitive strategies were used to improve the business performance and to gain a competitive advantage for the firm.A survey of the literature was conducted comprising business strategies, author and year along with their main purpose as shown in Table 1.
The researchers proposed the different competitive strategies that can be used globally in a different context of business.There were three basic strategies introduced by Porter in 1980 i.e.Cost leadership, Differentiation and Focus.With the passage of time, some other strategies were added into and derived from basics ones.Customer oriented and marketoriented strategies were used in 2006 for building strategies to fulfill customer and market need.Market differentiation is a sub-strategy of differentiation used in 2007 for producing a unique product in term of marketing.Similarly, quality differentiation, service differentiation, innovation differentiation was used in 2007, 2014, 2015 and onward for building service wise and quality wise unique products.Then in 2016, innovation strategy was further extended as product innovation and process innovation for the introduction and implementation of innovative product and process respectively.
Contemporary studies proved that time is a critical factor but in existing studies, time-based factors are merged with other strategies as sub factors.So, there is a need of timebased strategy for gaining a competitive advantage against competitors.

III. IMPORTANCE OF TIME-BASED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Traditional business strategies i.e.Differentiation, Cost leadership and/or focus consider "time" as a subfactor having less influence in competitive advantage.It may or may not be a subfactor in businesses other than IT but here it is a critical one.Based on the literature, it is found that time is a critical factor so a trinity of factors that can influence performance is presented in Fig. 1.A company can gain its competitive advantage against its competitor by focusing on differentiation, time, and cost.A company can use a strategy to manage low cost to get competitive advantage, it may invest more money to make a unique product, if it is investing money to deliver a unique product by utilizing Differentiation strategy and launching it without focusing on time then there is a chance that its competitor might take the competitive advantage by launching a product in adequate time i.e. pre-time, in time or post time.Fig. 2 shows that individual competitive strategies have a positive impact on competitive advantage for example if a company used Differentiation as a business strategy, then it will enhance the Competitive advantage for itself.Same is the case for cost leadership (to minimize overall cost).If we talk about Time leadership or time-based strategy then it will impact on the competitive advantage positively by completing product within planned time.
The introduction to the market of the product depends upon competitor's launch.This is because both competitors are aware of each other's commercialization, launching time and features of the product by different means.The most common way is to track the events of commercialization organized by competitors to get updates about being a launching product.Competitors add more features if needed to make the product more ideal to launch.If the features take more time than post-time is focused otherwise pre-time is suitable.In time product launch is ideal in the case of unique features are added in the product or the competitor is not launching its product at the same time.www.ijacsa.thesai.orgFig. 3. shows some common factors that affect all three business strategies to gain competitive advantage.If all these three strategies would apply to any product development than the result will be an ideal product i.e. a unique product is developing at low cost with minimum time.
A unique product with innovation will impact positively on Differentiation but it will take the time to market, more maintenance will require, time is important here because uniqueness will take more time.A flexible process claims low cost while commercialization will increase the cost.A more suitable and concrete planning will aid time leadership along with time to market and market needs those also impact positively on it.Here, time to market has a positive impact on time leadership; therefore, we cannot neglect individuality of both.[36].

Cost Leadership
About reducing the cost to the organization of delivering products or services.

Differentiation
Making your products or services unique from or more striking than those of your rivals.
Focus Focus on a narrow fragment and within that fragment try to accomplish either cost advantage or differentiation.Gaurav & Himanshu 2016 [39], Wa'el 2015 [40].

Customer Relation Management (CRM)
Organizing a company's relations with existing and outlook customers for improving business relationships and retaining customers John et al. 2006 [29] Customer Oriented Concentrate on fulfilling a customer's needs except only increasing profit.Devakumar & Barani 2016 [37] Market Penetration Practical for successfully using your product, when company enters a new market Helpful to increase product demand and raise market outline.John et al. 2006 [29], Bulent et al. 2007 [36]

Marketing and Market Oriented
Focus on how you increase sales by getting and keeping customers.Focus on the needs of the market.
Devakumar & Barani 2016 [37] Sale Service Support Provide maintenance after delivering the services.

Staff Development
The Staff Development Strategy is an information strategy with supporting process documents for Staff Development topics Jeffrey & Joohyung 2016 [31] Family Owned In which two or more family members are concerned and the mainstream of rights or control lay within a family.By using this strategy creativity, human resource efficiency, structural R&D factors, and cost in form of return and business growth may increases.

Innovation Differentiation
Finding ways to optimize a precise set of differentiators that are most relevant to a specific set of needs.Amir et al. 2014 [30], Amir et al 2015 [34].

Quality Differentiation
Used to differentiate product in terms of quality Amir et al. 2014 [30], Amir et al 2015 [34].

Marketing Differentiation
Used to differentiate product in terms of marketing www.ijacsa.thesai.org

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
We only present simulation for limited scenarios here.Simulation results for more concrete and real scenarios will be investigated in the upcoming paper.According to the simulation results, right decision can be made by foreseeing the impact of the result in the future.To investigate the factors that have an impact on the competitive advantage with respect to time, an extensive literature was carried out.Most influencing factors are extracted and mapped with respect to time.Time-tomarket of own versus a competitor, resources, HR skills, Project management, features of the own product, competitors and maintenance were the factors that affect competitive advantage.
The Likert scale was initially used for all factors to get the idea of winning competitive advantage of company A against its competitors more simply.Time to market was calculated for 2 companies to start the simulation; i.e. company A and its competitor.Then the difference was analyzed.If the company A has more week's spare to launch than its competitor and number of features it has built are more and/or unique than company A has more chances of winning competitive advantage by launching the product in time.On contrast, if it has low features and then it has to apply a sub-strategy to launch the product in post-time after completing the features, adding some more features and improving the limitations found in the recently launched product by the competitor.It is obvious that all the competitors keep track of each other's products updated by different means.If the competitor has more chances of launching the product in-time as it has a more positive value of time to market as compared to company A than company A has no other option unless it launches at posttime.Here, to apply another strategy of increasing resources, by simulating time difference and features differences but it will increase the cost.Now, let us simulate the impact of competitive advantage dependency.After performing simulations, generated results are presented in graphs to represent the trends how different factors are influencing when a time-based strategy is introduced.Fig. 4. shows, when the time difference is greater than 0 and feature difference is equal or greater than 0, then competitive advantage will be greater than zero and product could be launched.Competitive Advantage could be negative as well if the three differences go overall negative.In that case, Time based sub-strategies are applied as shown in Fig. 5.

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
We tried to highlight time-based competitive advantage with more focusing on time to complete and launch the product on pre-time, in time or post time to get the maximum advantage from the competitor.In the literature, time is used as a sub factor, however, intentions were to highlight its primary importance for example, in Information Technology time, cost and quality are most critical factors for a product to complete and majority of the software does not meet deadline and hence, their competitor take the advantage by launching the product at adequate time.They attract the market towards them.The simulation was performed to check the influence of different factors on time to get a competitive advantage.Small strategies were applied to get the competitive advantage with respect to the competitors.Simple scaling and raw data were used which will be replaced by the more concrete scale and empirical study in coming paper.We are claiming on this result that time-based competitive advantage needs primary importance as a strategy along with cost leadership and differentiation.In future work, we also intended to introduce time-based competitive advantage strategy in local as well as in global software development context (GSD).In GSD, time zone difference is the main reason for increasing problem in synchronous communication and not completing the project with-in time that leads to the failure of the projects or causing a delay in the launching of the product.By introducing time-based strategy in global context, we may gain a competitive advantage in round the clock development as compared to our competitors.www.ijacsa.thesai.org

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Trinity of time, cost, and differentiation to gain competitive advantages.