Capstone Experience In Integration and Strategies

Question: The internal environmental scan or organizational assessment should include the following: Mission, vision, and values: Assess the organizations understanding of the mission, vision, and values, and how they relate the business strategy. Is there consensus on the mission and vision of the organization? What are the shared values of the organization? What are the behaviors espoused by these values? Strategy clarification: Assess the organizations understanding of the business strategy through the interview with a mid-level or senior manager. Assess his or her understanding and agreement of the business units value proposition, market position, and competitive advantage. Cultural assessment: Explain the unwritten rules and shared values that govern behaviors in the organization. Do they act as enablers or blockers to the strategy? For example, is there a culture of information sharing and collaboration that enables the organization to respond quickly across structural boundaries to solve problems for customers? On the other hand, do groups not share important information through informal mechanisms, thus slowing response times? Value chain analysis: Identify the primary (direct) and support (indirect) activities that create and deliver your product or service to your customers. Assess each activitys contribution to competitive advantage through cost or differentiation. Identify any areas where the business may be at a competitive disadvantage. Summary of findings: Using these different analyses, identify the organizational strengths and weaknesses as they relate to the business strategy. Organizational strengths are assets, capabilities, and resources that contribute directly to the organizations strategic fit, differentiation, and competitive advantage relative to competing organizations. Organizational weaknesses are characteristics and capabilities (often lacking) that place the organization at a disadvantage relative to competitors. Answer: Introduction: This assignment deals with a case study that describes an internal environmental analysis of an organization. To demonstrate this analysis, Walmart has been taken into consideration. In this report a brief description of Walmart's mission, vision and values have been demonstrated. To understand the internal environment of Walmart, different types of strategy has been implemented. This assignment also provides SWOT analysis of the Walmarts internal environment. Walmarts mission, vision and values: Walmart is an American multinational retail giant founded by Sam Walton in 1962. Since their origin, Walmart focuses on making an impact in the lives of its customers by helping them to save money and time. Walmarts focuses on to provide excellent customer services to the online, in a store or mobile device using customers. Walmarts slogan and its mission statement are almost identical. The mission of Walmart states that save money of the people so that they can live better. As for vision, Walmart does not have anything in writing. But there were five value guidelines that influence Walmarts future. They are- Integrity, Opportunity, Family and Community, Purpose and responsibility (walmart.com, 2016). Strategies Clarification: Walmart uses a mixture of the strategy of differentiation and cost leadership. They provide a variety of products and services with better or same quality at a lower price than its competitors. Walmarts tries to keep their business strategies simple and open for all levels of their employees (Darroch, 2014). This has been done to eliminate any time of miss communication between different employees and they can able to perform to their full potential. As one the giants of retail industry, Walmart always tries to maintain a positive relationship with their employees to create healthy working atmosphere (Angeles, 2012). Walmarts cultural assessment: Walmart's success has been build upon its well-organized culture. Walmarts unwritten cultural is based on this factors- respect to every individual, services to the customers and starving for the excellence. Walmart has been unique in their relationship with the customers. Their philosophy of providing highest possible quality services at the lowest possible prices has given them an immense competitive advantage over its competitors. They are concept of starving for excellence has become a fashionable concept among its competitors. They are current CEO and President Sam Walton focuses on to implement concept where every customer can be able to get its desired products or services at the lowest possible price. These elements of Walmart's culture have played an enormous role in their phenomenal success. Value chain analysis of Walmart: Walmart is arguably the biggest retail chain in the world. It is among the top five companies in Fortune 500 list. Walmart operations are the combination of their three business segments- Walmart Stores, Sam's Club, Walmart International. Out of these, Walmart's stores is the largest segment. This segment has three division- Super-centers, Discount stores and Neighborhood markets. Walmart international businesses are based in the Argentina, Germany, Canada, South Korea and UK. The company uses LIFO method for their store segment and cost LIFO method for their Sams club segment. Walmarts supercenters and discount stores purchases are shipped from their distribution centers. The balances of different merchandise purchased are shipped to the stores directly from the suppliers. In the international segment, distribution centers are located in different parts of the world which allow Walmart to ship the product quickly to their customers (Rao, 2013). The majority of the businesses in stores are account for nationally advertise merchandise. Walmart is committed to purchase services and products from the local vendors instead of purchasing it from anywhere else cheaply. Walmarts innovative network encourages inexperience vendors to grow their business. By helping them to identify the risk involved in launching a new product and services (Fung, 2014). Summary of the analysis: In the past ten years, Walmart has able to maintain strong and consistent growth in sales and revenue. Hence, it has able to maintain its position in the retail industry market. The above analysis has showed that price is the most critical factor is the success of Walmart. Value chain analysis showed that Walmart has been successful in implementing the strategy as the low cost leader by inculcating efficiency in the cost factor in its culture and operations. Walmart has a well structured organizational atmosphere to implement their strategies properly (Gordon, 2014). SWOT analysis of Walmart: Since price is the most influential factors in the success of the retail giant Walmart, SWOT analysis mainly focuses on their strategies that enable them to remain unique from its competitors. Strengths: Walmart has competitive advantages in the use of information technologies to support its logistic system globally. To identify this advantage, individual products performance worldwide, store by store can be taken into consideration. People are the key to the success of Walmart. Its management team always focuses on to develop their human recourses. Lot of investment of time and money are made by the management team to train their existing employees so that they can perform to their optimum level. Walmart is probably the most powerful retail brand. Its reputation of value for money and a wide range of products and service offering has given it an edge over its competitors. Walmart also has grown globally in few years that given it the opportunity to penetrate in the new markets (HUANG Yu, 2015). Weakness: Since Walmart's business includes many sectors like- stationary, food, clothing etc., sometime in spite of its IT advantages, may face flexibility issues. Since this requires a huge span of control that can create a problem in managing it properly. Walmart is facing immense competition from stores like Kmart and Target in North America. Many small retailers are able to found the niche market and they are able to compete with giants like Walmart successfully (LI, 2014). Walmart is a giant in the retail industry globally, but still has relatively less presence worldwide. Hence, its business is yet to be spread globally that might cause them to face new challenges in order to remain competitive in that particular market. Opportunities: Since Walmart is yet to be spread globally, it opens up huge opportunities for them to merge or from alliances with global retailers that will give them new customer base. Markets like China and Europe can help Walmart to grow their business immensely. New store type and location give Walmart the opportunities to exploits development of their market. They can diversify their business from huge supercenters to local based sites. In recent years, the online growth of sales has increases very quickly. This gives companies like Walmart great opportunities to get close to their potential customers (Santos Laczniak, 2015). Threats: Competitors like Costco, Amazon and Target are putting efforts to eliminate the differences in the price that Walmart enjoys from their start of the business. Except the price factor, Walmart does not differ too much from other retailers in terms of quality and other factors. Hence, if their competitors can able to fill up the price gap, it will force Walmart to face immense competition from its rivals. It has been spotted that Walmart superstores have a negative impact on the local communities and retailers. Since the opening of Walmart stores has forced some of the retailers to close off their business. This creates an adverse impact on the society about Walmart. Rising products prices with time have also created a negative impact on the business of the Walmart. Since providing high quality product in cheaper price is the major objective of the organization, increasing products price has squeezed their profit margins (Raja Gunaseelan, 2015). Balance Scorecard Financial Customer Learning and Growth Internal Process Walmart earned $482.13 billion revenue in 2015. Increase customers by 5% in every five years. Provide wide range of services and products. Develop more effective communication process among different levels of employees. Its total assets amount close to $200 billion in 2015. Increase customers rating by 10% in every one year. Walmart prices have to be lowest in the market. Provide proper training to the existing employees. Walmart operating income is estimated close to $25 billion in 2015. Reduce number of complaints by customers by 4% in every three years. Improve quality of stocked product to enhance customer satisfaction. Communicate future goals to all the employees to avoid any type of miscommunication. Table 1: Balance Scorecard of Walmart (Source: Gordon, 2014) References: Angeles, R. (2012). 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