Strategic analysis is the process that firms use to study and understand the many different layers and aspects of their competitive environment. Why do firms spend time and money trying to understand what is going on around them? Firms do not operate in a vacuum. They are impacted by forces and factors from inside their organizations and outside in the world at large. Understanding these forces and factors is crucial to achieving success as a business. For example, grocery chains like Giant Eagle have increased the number organic items carried in their stores. This is a strategic move to match changing consumer preferences.
The external environment is continually changing, and the most successful firms are able to prepare for and adapt to environmental changes because they have done their homework and understand how external forces impact their operations. Managers try to avoid being “taken by surprise” by unexpected events that would impact their organizations through an ongoing process called environmental scanning. Environmental scanning is a high-level, broad-based process of gathering, analyzing, and dispensing information for purpose of developing strategies or tactics. The process entails getting both factual data and qualitative opinions. Organizations also scan when they are considering whether to enter a particular industry. From a local coffee shop to an international corporation, firms of all sizes benefit from this type of strategic analysis.
Industry Analysis
The purpose of strategic management is to create competitive advantage. But how do companies know they have competitive advantage? In the long term, competitive advantage will lead to greater profitability. But in the shorter term, it is difficult for companies to assess how well they are creating competitive advantage. An industry analysis is a method for a company to assess its market position relative to its competitors. An industry analysis is meant to help a company review various market and financial factors in its industry that affect the business, including evaluating the competition. This analysis helps managers understand the important factors of the marketplace and how these factors may be used to gain a competitive advantage. Industry analyses are an important tool for companies to assess their strategy in a shorter time frame.
Because conditions in the business environment are constantly changing, industry analyses need to be done periodically to keep up with developments. This can be a very time-consuming process and, if not done accurately, can lead to bad strategic decisions. For this reason, managers may go to outside firms, either to produce the analysis or to provide data for the company to complete an analysis. A number of companies exist that maintain huge databases of information about particular industries, such as Hoovers and IBIS. These companies have methods for gathering the data and for analyzing the data to produce reports.
The Competitive Environment
A firm’s competitive environment includes components inside the firm and outside the firm. External factors are things in the global environment that may impact a firm’s operations or success. Examples of external factors could include a rise in interest rates or a natural disaster. External factors cannot be controlled, but they must be managed effectively and to understand them so that the firm can be as successful. For example, the unemployment rate will affect a firm’s ability to hire qualified employees at a reasonable rate of pay. If unemployment is high, meaning that a lot of people are looking for jobs, then a firm will probably have a lot of applicants for any positions it needs to fill. It will be able to choose more highly qualified applicants to hire and may be able to hire them at a lower pay rate because the employee would rather work for a lower pay rate than not have a job at all. On the other hand, when unemployment is low, meaning that not many people are looking for jobs, firms may have to offer higher pay or settle for lower qualifications to find someone to fill a position.
Internal factors are characteristics of the firm itself. To plan to compete against other firms, a firm needs to understand what physical, financial, and human resources it has, what it is good at, and how it is organized. For example, Walmart has a sophisticated IT system that tracks inventory and automatically orders products before they run out, by calculating how long it will take for the new product to arrive and comparing that to the rate at which the product is selling off the shelves. The system orders new product so that it will arrive just as the product on the shelves is running out, so that Walmart stores do not need to have storage space for inventory. All Walmart inventory is on the store shelves, ready to be sold to customers. How does this system benefit Walmart? It does not have to spend money on storing or keeping track of inventory, all products in the store can generate revenue because they are available for customers to buy, and when the system is working optimally, the store never runs out of items customers want.
External and internal factors are reviewed in a number of strategic analysis tools, from the SWOT Analysis to the PESTEL to the VRIO – all of which we’ll walk through in the following pages.
Management 2020 text remixed from multiple sources under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. View a complete list of original sources.
