BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is an approach to uncommon improvement in operative effectiveness through the redesigning of important business processes and supporting business systems. It is revolutionary design of key business methods that involves examination of the fundamental process itself. The orientation of redesigning efforts is essentially radical. In alternative words, it is a complete deconstruction and rethinking of business method in its completeness.

TURNAROUND STRATEGIES

There is no standard model of how a company should respond to a decline. A number of generic successful turnaround strategies have been identified. It is common that a number of these will be deployed at the same time. They include:

• changing the management,
• redefining the company’s strategic focus,
• divesting for closing unwanted assets,
• improving profitability of remaining operation,
• making acquisitions to rebuild core operations.

COMPETENCY MAPPING

Competencies are the skills and abilities of a person that lead to higher performance in a specific area. It is often expressed as the combination of knowledge, skills, attitude and personality of a person as applied to a job in the context of the current and future surroundings that accounts for sustained success within the framework of organizational values. Therefore, competency mapping is the process of identifying key competencies for an organization and the jobs and functions within it. It explains how a job might be done, a competence only describes what needs has to be done; not how.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

 Collective bargaining usually denotes the negotiation, administration and interpretation of an official document between two parties that covers a specific period of time.This agreement or contract lay out in specific terms the conditions of employment, puts some limits on employees and sets limits on management’s authority.

LEADERSHIP STYLE

Leadership style describes how top managers behave in leading and motivating their organizations to achieve their desired goals. Leadership style is a crucial aspect of leadership implementation. 

SWOT ANALYSIS

SWOT stands for Strengths and Weaknesses of a business and environmental Opportunities and Threats a business faces. SWOT analysis identifies systematically these factors and the strategy that reflects the best match between them.

EXPERIENCE CURVE ANALYSIS

In the 1960’s management consultants at the Boston Consulting Group observed a consistent relationship between the cost of production and the cumulative production quality. Data showed that the real value-added production cost declined by 20 to 30 percent for each doubling of cumulative production quantity:

STAFFING FOR GLOBAL OPERATIONS

Implementing a strategy of International expansion takes a lot of planning and can be very expensive.  At the first level of planning, staffing policy suitable for a particular kind of business, require decision-making at its global strategy, and its geographic locations. Key issues involve the difficulty of control in geographically spread operations, the need for local  decision making independent of the home office, and the suitability of managers from other sources.

STRATEGIC EVALUATION

 The process of strategic evaluation and control operates on the basis of the different organizational systems used for implementation of a strategy. The organizational systems play a significant role in strategy implementation and evaluation. The role of organizational systems in strategic evaluation and control is as follows:

OPERATIONAL CONTROL SYSTEMS

Operational control systems aim at allocation and use of firm’s various resources by evaluating performance of organizational units to assess their contribution in the achievement of organizational objectives. Operational controls systems direct, monitor, and assess progress in achieving annual objectives.

STRATEGIC CONTROL SYSTEMS

Strategic control systems are the conventional target-fixing, measurement, and feed- back systems that enable strategic managers to evaluate whether a company is achieving superior efficiency, quality, innovation, and customer responsiveness and implementing its strategy successfully.

SIGNIFICANCE OF STRATEGIC EVALUATION

The process of strategic management requires that strategists establish organizational objectives and then formulate strategies to achieve them. The process of strategy implementation begins with the identification of the key managerial tasks that form the basis for the creation of organizational structure and design.

VARIANTS OF BUSINESS STRATEGY

  Business strategy has different variants. Some of which are discussed here.

 1. Low Price/Added Value: This strategy may seem attractive, but there are successful organizations that have followed it. It is the 'cheap and nasty' option. It involves reducing price accompanied by low perceived value added and focusing on a price-sensitive segment. 

BAFFLED IN THE MIDDLE

Each strategy makes its own demands on the organization to make consistent choices in terms of product, market & distinctive competency to establish a competitive advantage. A firm pursuing one strategy should gain from elements of the other strategies too, as long as this did not detract it from its chosen strategy.

FOCUS STRATEGY

The focus strategy is directed serving the needs of a limited customer group or segment. ‘A focused company concentrates on serving a specific market niche defined either geographically or by type of customer or by segment of the product line. 

PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION

The strategic choices of a product differentiator in terms of product differentiation, market segmentation and distinctive competency are:

DIFFERENTIATION

If cost leadership is not a feasible option, but the firm is able to differentiate its products along some attributes that customers’ value, and the cost of doing so is lower than the extra revenue envisaged, then differentiation may be the appropriate strategy to pursue.

COST LEADERSHIP

In order to achieve cost leadership reduction should be continuous to maintain the cost differential with competitors and should involve an understanding of all stages of the value chain for a product or service of a firm.  It can be gained by means of such methods as proprietary access to cheaper inputs or technologies, or by positioning to exploit any experience effects.

STRATEGIC CHOICES OF COST LEADERSHIP

The strategic choices of a cost leader in terms of differentiation of the product market segmentation of the market and distinctive competency are:

COST LEADERSHIP STRATEGY

Cost leadership is a competitive strategy  aimed at achieving the low cost that targets the broad mass market and requires aggressive construction of efficient-scale facilities, vigorous pursuit of cost reduction from experience, tight cost and overhead control, avoidance of marginal customer accounts, and cost minimization in areas like R&D, service, sales force, advertising, and so on.