Value Chain Analysis Template

About the Porter’s Value Chain Model (aka Value Chain Analysis template)

Commonly known as the Value Chain Analysis, Porter’s Value Chain Model is a much-used method to evaluate a business’s competitive edge and improve processes to have fewer bottlenecks and add more value to your customers. 

What is a value chain analysis template?

A value chain analysis template includes a set of activities a company performs to deliver a valuable product from start to finish. The analysis allows your team to visualize all the business activities involved in creating the product — and helps you identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and miscommunications within the process. 

Create your own value chain analysis template 

Getting started with your team’s value chain analysis template is easy with Miro. Simply click “Use Template” and take the following steps to customize it for your own value chain analysis template:

Step 1: Replace the canned text in the orange squares and blue lines with your business’s specific primary and support business activities. 

Step 2: Use sticky notes to map out the process for each business activity.

Step 3: Identify where bottlenecks occur and find areas where you can maximize value and gain a competitive advantage.

Make sure to consider using Miro's Value Stream Mapping tool during this process. This framework can help improve the efficiency of a specific process, which can then be integrated into a broader Value Chain Analysis to optimize the overall value delivery of the organization. Several value stream mapping templates are available on Miro to help get you started.

Benefits of using a value chain analysis template

First coined by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, Porter’s Value Chain Model helps your team evaluate your business activities so you can find ways to improve your competitive advantage. The value chain analysis will also help you determine costs, find activities that add the most value, outshine your competitors, and improve the value of what you deliver to your customers.

Building a product can be costly in terms of both time and resources. Even worse, it can be almost impossible to know whether a process works until after you’ve tried it. Porter’s Value Chain Model helps you visualize more complex or intangible processes.

Every business should perform this analysis at some point. Your team can do this anytime you want to improve your competitive advantage taking the following steps:

1. Define your business’s primary activities (e.g. logistics, operations, marketing).

2. Define your business’s support activities (e.g. HR, infrastructure, tech).

3. Analyze the cost and value of each.

4. Discover opportunities that allow you to gain a competitive advantage.