Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control

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Purpose of Assignment

Weeks 3, 4 and 5 Individual Assignments are integrated to generate a Strategic Management Plan. This is part three of the three part Strategic Management Plan addressing strategy implementation, evaluation and control. The purpose of the Week 5 individual assignment is to allow the student to discuss and explain how the strategies discussed in prior weeks are converted into implementation activities both domestically and internationally, in alignment with legal, social and ethical considerations. Furthermore, the student has an opportunity to explain and discuss how the strategic plan and implementation activities will be monitored.

Weeks 3, 4, and 5 Individual Assignments are integrated to generate a Strategic Management Plan. This is Part 3 of the three part Strategic Management Plan.

Assignment Steps

Write a 1,050-word report on the company you selected in Week 3, following up on the Individual Assignment of Week 3 (Environmental Scanning), and address the following:

  • Strategy Implementation
    • Discuss International Strategy.
    • Discuss Strategic Implementation.
    • Explain the influence of Governance and Ethics.
    • Discuss the Company Social Value.
    • Discuss Innovation and Diversification.
    • Discuss Legal limitations.
  • Evaluation and Control
    • Explain Strategic Metrics.
    • Discuss Key Financial Ratios.

Cite at least 3 scholarly references.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

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Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control Grading Guide MGT/498 Version 4 Strategic Management Copyright Copyright © 2016 by University of Phoenix. All rights reserved. University of Phoenix® is a registered trademark of Apollo Group, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft®, Windows®, and Windows NT® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Use of these marks is not intended to imply endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation. Edited in accordance with University of Phoenix® editorial standards and practices. Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control Grading Guide MGT/498 Version 4 Individual Assignment: Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control Purpose of Assignment Week 3, 4 and 5 Individual Assignments are integrated to generate a Strategic Management Plan. This is part three of the three part Strategic Management Plan addressing strategy implementation, evaluation and control. The Purpose of the Week 5 individual assignment is to allow the student to discuss and explain how the strategies discussed in prior weeks are converted into implementation activities both domestically and internationally, in alignment with legal, social and ethical considerations. Furthermore, the student has an opportunity to explain and discuss how the strategic plan and implementation activities will be monitored. Resources Required Textbook Chapters 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14 Grading Guide Content Met Partially Met Not Met Total Available Total Earned 6 #/6 Comments: Student addresses the following regarding strategy implementation: a. Discuss International Strategy. b. Discuss Strategic Implementation. c. Explain the influence of Governance and Ethics. d. Discuss the Company Social Value. e. Discuss Innovation and Diversification. f. Discuss Legal limitations. Student addresses the following regarding evaluation and control: a. Explain Strategic Metrics. b. Discuss Key Financial Ratios. The paper is 1,050 words in length. Writing Guidelines The paper—including tables and graphs, headings, title page, and reference page—is consistent with APA formatting guidelines and meets course-level requirements. Met Partially Met Not Met Comments: 2 Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control Grading Guide MGT/498 Version 4 Writing Guidelines Met Partially Met Not Met Total Available Total Earned 3 #/3 9 #/9 Intellectual property is recognized with in-text citations and a reference page. Paragraph and sentence transitions are present, logical, and maintain the flow throughout the paper. Sentences are complete, clear, and concise. Rules of grammar and usage are followed including spelling and punctuation. Assignment Total Additional comments: # Comments: 3 Running head: STRATEGY FORMULATION Wal-Mart’s Strategy Formulation Hank Stump MGT/498 April 22, 2019 John Hawes 1 STRATEGY FORMULATION 2 Long-term Goals and Objectives Strategy Formulation The process of strategy formulation at Wal-Mart follows the understanding the company has of its target market. However, the first step is setting up the objectives of a particular business year. Thompson et al. (2015) note that such a strategy requires a keen analysis of the market and the position of the organization in the industry. The next step is to evaluate the environment; the position of the competition is considered to ensure the company maintains its competitive advantage. Additionally, the company focuses on its performance of the previous business year. The analysis will provide critical information on the performance of the company in comparison to its competition. Finally, the company settles on a strategy from the list developed from the above steps. The markets the company will pursue Wal-Mart Inc. is an organization that has 8500 branches in over fifteen countries. Pursuing more markets for the company involves exploring the penetration of international markets. It is in this sense that the company is considering Canada and Asia. In these markets, the company plans on focusing majorly on clothes and most specifically children’s clothes. In the process, the company will expand its brand name and develop more revenue resources. A keen analysis of the situation indicates that the company will rely heavily on market research that will create a better perspective of the target market in Canada and Asia. The company will also have an understanding of the level of competition in the markets. STRATEGY FORMULATION 3 The value the company will add in the new markets. Once the company successfully penetrates the markets, the customers will receive highquality services that will play a significant role in marketing the company (Coursaris et al. 2013). As a result, the customers will have high satisfaction levels that will assist in building the company’s reputation in the region. Additionally, the clients in the area will benefit from the affordable prices that are part of the company’s marketing strategies. Besides, the economy of the regions will improve as the company will hire employees from the local regions. Furthermore, the supplies will be acquired locally in a bid to suit the needs of the local markets. The required resources and capabilities One of the significant resources that Wal-Mart utilizes is human capital. The fact that the Wal-Mart is in the sale of consumer products makes it necessary for the company to have a vast number of employees. Depending on the organizational structure, the company will hire local employees and supervisors. However, the managers will be from the headquarters (Smith et al. 2015). In this way, the company will ensure that the local region benefits from the existence of their branches. Additionally, the company requires having a highly reliable communication infrastructure. Therefore, there will be a need for the use of technology to ensure there is effective communication between the branches and the headquarters. How the company will capture the value and sustain competitive advantage In the consumer products industry, there is a need to build and maintain reputation (Coursaris et al. 2013. To achieve a solid reputation, Wal-Mart will place importance on STRATEGY FORMULATION 4 consistency in affordable prices and quality services. Irrespective of the competition in the region, the company will maintain its prices and ensure its clients have access to a variety of consumer products. The company will seek means of maintaining its competitive advantage by providing situations where it makes a high amount of sales to cover the low prices and increase profits margins. Business Management Strategy Cost and differentiation advantages Through differentiation, Wal-Mart will have high productivity levels that will give the company an opportunity of maintaining its competitive advantage which is the low prices. Furthermore, the company will have a chance of taking advantage of its capabilities to further its goals and objectives (Thompson et al, 2015). A keen analysis of the situation indicates that the company will have better use of the available technology. In this sense, Wal-Mart will utilize social media to develop real-time marketing strategies that will increase the company’s market share. In the end, the company will maintain its competitive advantage that involves low prices as it will have a more significant market share. Describe the corporate strategy Wal-Mart Inc. has a keen understanding of the changing market trends in the consumer products industry. From this understanding, the company maintains the clients’ interest through the assurance of great service. As a corporate strategy, the company assesses the importance of increasing its employees’ job satisfaction levels. With highly motivated employees ensures the link between the organization and the consumers is healthy (Smith et al. 2015). Additionally, the company focuses on the environment and ensures its suppliers operate under the required STRATEGY FORMULATION 5 environmental conservation regulations. In this way, the company protects the environment and ensures that all its business associates are in line with environmental conservation. Vertical integration Wal-Mart is a company that is a form of a distributor and acts as a middleman between the suppliers and the consumers. The company, therefore, does not grow its agricultural products or manufacture its electronic products for instance. However, its vertical integration consists of the suppliers and the relationships between the two factions (Coursaris et al. 2013). The association is primarily a form of a raw material in which it plays a significant role in the company’s ability to having products for sale. The company thus integrates with the suppliers as they are the lifeline between the company and the source of their products. Strategic alliances As noted above, the company’s relationship is of great importance to its survival. The company, therefore, has an alliance with the suppliers that protect its relevancy. Notably, the company must develop collaboration with the hosting state to ensure there are protection and universal good-will from the relevant authority. The developing alliances ensure there is no interruption of business (Thompson et al. 2015). Additionally, having an alliance with the hosting state ensures the company has a steady supply of products and employees. The strategic alliances are contributing factors to the existence of the company in the new markets. In essence, the strategic collaborations bring the company closer to the market and ensure business continuation. Wal-Mart competitive advantage STRATEGY FORMULATION 6 Wal-Mart has a variety of competitive advantages that have assisted the company to remain in business for decades. For instance, low prices are one of its significant competitive advantages (Thompson et al. 2015). The company’s pricing strategy focuses on offering the products at the minimum cost possible. The organization then survives by ensuring it makes high amounts of sales to create consistent profits. A keen analysis of the situation indicates that the low prices are a marketing strategy for the company as the company has a history of high amounts of sales. The low prices make Wal-Mart a significant competition for other players in the industry. Wal-Mart’s organizational chart Michael T. Duke President and CEO S. Robinson Walton Chairman of the Board of Directors Sam's Club Walmart International Wal-Mart United States Rosalid Brewer Doug McMillan William.S. Simon CEO CEO CEO STRATEGY FORMULATION 7 References Arthur, T., Stricklan, A. J. & Gamble, J. (2015). Crafting and Executive Strategy: Concepts and Readings. DuraSpace. Coursaris, K. C., Osch, V. W., & Balogh, A. B. (2013). A Social Media Marketing Typology: Classifying Brand Face-book Page Messages for Strategic Consumer Engagement. Association for Information Systems: AIS Electronic Library. Smith, L., Wen, S. T. & Popkin, M. B. (2015). Gains Made by Wal-Mart’s Healthier Food Initiative Mirror Preexisting Trends. Health Affairs. Running head: ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 1 Environmental Scanning Hank Stump MGT/498 April 15, 2019 John Hawes ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 2 Environmental Scanning Environmental Scanning Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail company that was established by Sam Walton. Walton believed in leadership through service since his goals were bringing great value and quality customer services. The first store opened by Walton was a small dime store in Bentonville which received huge success influencing him to open the first Walmart in Arkansas. The success experienced by Walmart was due to the values by Walton of offering lower prices and with great customer service to his clients. The company experienced steady success which led to it going public in 1970 and the proceeds from the company financed an expansion of the business. Walmart is currently a global company operating in several regions in the World and the major focus of the company is its investments in the people, stores and also the advancing technology. The company has been able to bring new approaches to technology and also, trying out with new store structures which include Sam’s Club and the Walmart Supercenter (Finkelman, 1997). In this paper, we will be discussing Walmart Inc. management functions. Environmental Scanning Environmental scanning as a business management function involves the procedure of collecting organizational information and understanding the relationship between the organization’s internal and external surroundings. Walmart is a company that has experienced success in its operations due to its associations with technological advancements which has in turn greatly influenced the corporation’s business approach of “everyday low prices”. Walmart ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 3 was the pioneer company in some of the leading technological advancements such as bar code scanning and analyzing point of sale information. Walmart also launched its own satellite in 1980 which had a lot of impact on the company’s business practices most profoundly on its supply chain management process. Some of the strategic systems spear headed by the industry luminary, Kevin Turner such as Retail-Link was significant it is enabling data integration and sharing between the company and its suppliers. The strategic systems were also significant in enabling the concept of vendor managed inventory. In the mid 1980’s Walmart developed a $4billion software and hardware system whose aim was to gather consumer-behavior information on what they were buying which was to aid the company in knowing how to store the correct products in the appropriate store. The most competitive e-commerce companies include Amazon and Jet.com which have a vast ecosystem of prime membership and they are able to deliver a wide variety of products and they also have a secure payment system that makes them to be more attractive to their customers. To respond to these emerging technologies Walmart has held the belief that information technology provides a competitive advantage over other industry leaders which has made them move from the traditional business strategies to the suitability of e-commerce. Walmart allocated resources to invest in digital capabilities that would allow the company to compete effectively and better align their resources with the consumer preferences (Chatwin, 2013). Competitive Advantage Walmart’s historical information strategy was focused on an internal approach which has created innovative business strategies that have allowed the company to gain competitive ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 4 advantages globally. The emerging technologies have influenced the need for Walmart to revise its business strategies to increase their geographical reach and transform their existing retail infrastructure to be able to compete with online retail companies such as Amazon. Walmart has recently revamped its cloud-based technology by developing information centers and also creating cloud-based business tools. Walmart natured in e-commerce to enable them effectively to compete with online retail companies by recently combining Sam’s Club with Instacart for delivering real-time services. The company has built their efforts in e-commerce expansion plans and strategies which has accelerated their online sales giving them a competitive advantage over other brick and mortar stores in the United States. Walmart has also recently improved its merchandise listing on their web with more innovative informative descriptions to present new initiatives on their online sites. Although, Walmart are still grasping on their traditional business strategy due to the challenging nature of online retail. The company’s United States e-commerce sales soared to 23% in the fourth quarter and its shares also rose to 31.1% over the past year as compared to the previous 24.5% (Lakdawalla et al, 2005). Strategies to Create Value and gain Competitive Advantage Walmart’s investors influence the strategic choices of the organization and they are the individuals, groups and companies that impact the organization. Walmart has had little resistance from their investors on its e-commerce venture due to its ability to increase company revenues. The customers and suppliers have also gained from the online venture due the easy transaction modes in place and the availability of a wide variety of products. There are a series of organizational changes that have taken place in Walmart Company to enable them cope with the ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 5 changing technological nature of the retail environment. Walmart is not a technological company but over the years it has had to embrace technologies in its business strategies which has influenced organizational change and interdepartmental collaborations. The recent advancement to e-commerce has led to the development of a common system for the entire company together with its subsidiaries which has eased communication between departments both locally and globally. Walmart due to the technological change to e-commerce it developed a common platform where all its stakeholders could have real-time interaction which is both economical and efficient (Price, 1996). Measurement Guidelines Walmart makes use of sustainability guide which functions as an instrument to for refining merchandises that their clients prefer, assimilate sustainability into the company, augment the quality of their merchandise, upsurge competes in their supply chain and improve the output loop by decreasing expenses. Walmart believes in building sustainability as a measurement guideline that the organization uses to verify the effectiveness of its strategies. Walmart collaborated with the Sustainability Consortium to develop metrics to evaluate significant indicators for examining the efficiency of the organization’s strategies. The company together with its partner developed a standardized system for relaying of information on sustainability all through the merchandise value chain. The system is identified as the sustainability measurement and reporting method which serves as an international podium for states to evaluate and report on merchandise sustainability. According to Walmart’s ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 6 management, the company’s goal is to acquire the right metrics to advance their measurement guideline for assessing the effectiveness of their strategies (Feng et al, 2010). Effectiveness of Walmart’s Measurement Guidelines The sustainability measurement and reporting system has been an effective measurement guideline since it enables a rigorous product level life cycle assessment and offers an arena to communicate sustainability information through the supply chain. This measurement guidelines are effective since it enables sustainability of the organization’s strategies that ensures increased product quality, supply efficiency and an increase in productivity loop. Walmart has heavily benefitted from these measurement guidelines since they are able to measure the sustainability of their suppliers and develop effective strategies to easily integrate their global supply chains effortlessly. Walmart is however in the process of identifying better metrics to include in their measurement guidelines to ensure the organization gains its business potential in the global technological business environment. ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING 7 References Chatwin, R. E. (2013, June). An overview of computational challenges in online advertising. In American Control Conference (ACC), 2013 (pp. 5990-6007). IEEE. Feng, S. C., Joung, C. B., & Li, G. (2010, May). Development overview of sustainable manufacturing metrics. In Proceedings of the 17th CIRP international conference on life cycle engineering (Vol. 6, p. l2). PRC Hefei. Finkelman, P. (1997). Dred Scott v. Sandford: A brief history with documents (p. 2). Boston, MA: Bedford Books. Lakdawalla, D., Philipson, T., & Bhattacharya, J. (2005). Welfare-enhancing technological change and the growth of obesity. American Economic Review, 95(2), 253-257. Price, R. M. (1996). Executive forum: technology and strategic advantage. California Management Review, 38(3), 38-56.
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Explanation & Answer

Attached.

STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION

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Wall-Mart’s Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control
Name:
Institutional Affiliation:

STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION


Strategic implementation
➢ International strategy
➢ Strategic implementation
➢ Influence of governance and ethics
➢ Social values
➢ Innovation and diversification
➢ Legal limitations



Evaluation and control
➢ Strategic metrics
➢ Key financial ratios

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Running head: STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION

Wal-Mart’s Strategy Implementation, Evaluation and Control
Name:
Institutional Affiliation:

1

STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION

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Introduction
Wal-Mart Inc. is one of America’s largest consumer product companies. The success of
the company is mainly as a result of extensive market researches that produce relevant data that
allow for appropriate strategy implementation. The following paper thus focuses on the
company’s implementation strategy in addition to its evaluation and control.
Strategic Implementation
International strategy
In recent years, Wal-Mart has sought means of expanding its operations in international
markets. In the process, the company has settled on India as a prospect (Kim & Mauborgne,
2017). India provides a vast market for Wal-Mart’s operations as it has a huge population.
However, the company has to comply with the country’s operation’s systems to reduce conflicts
and legal challenges. Additionally, Wal-Mart has extensive branches in the UK. Unfortunately,
the performance of the groceries department in the region is underperforming as a result of the
highly saturated markets. The company, therefore, intends ...


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