Abstract
For a company to succeed in its operations and meet its core values and objectives, a company analysis is important. This analysis gives an understanding of the company performance and its ability to meet its mission, vision and value statements.
In order to achieve this, a company must initially form a strategy that guide it through the financial year and a review of the benefits of the strategy at different times of the financial year. These reviews bring an understanding of the company’s performance in respect to the strategy.
In this paper, the focus is on the company analysis of World Wide technology Inc. The paper addresses the methods that the company may use to validate its vision, mission and values statements, and the sources used to perform the external and internal environmental analysis.
World Wide Technology Inc Company Analysis
World Wide technology Inc (WWT) was founded in 1990 to provide integrated systems to the telecommunication, government and commercial sectors in the United States of America. It is one of the largest companies in the United States in Cisco sales. Like other organizations, the company has its mission, vision and value statements.
The vision defines the reason of the WWT existence, the mission defines what the WWT intends to do in support of the vision and the values defines the guidelines or principles of WWT (Kazmi, 2002).
In validation of the vision, mission and value statements, WWT must form a strategy towards achieving them. The strategy should focus on the strengths, weaknesses, available opportunities and the threats to the company (Steiner, 1979). This gives the company an understanding of the internal and external factors.
In the evaluation of the strengths, the company focuses on what it can manage to do in order to achieve its overall goals (Bohm, 2008). It starts with evaluation of the employees view towards the vision, mission and the value statement. If the employees embrace the overall goals of WWT, then the company can focus on other factors such as financial strengths and market (Bohm, 2008).
In finance, the WWT should evaluate its statements to ensure that they meet the required threshold of achieving the overall goals. WWT should ensure that they have enough finance to cater for any unpredictable occurrences such as fluctuation in the economy (Dealtry, 1992). In addition, WWT should evaluate their market to ensure that they have a competitive advantage (Steiner, 1979).
Here, the company should evaluate their products and services and their penetration in the market. They should also analyze whether they have been able to be ahead of their competitors. One of the goals of WWT is to be the leading company in the production of quality goods and services and the company should ensure that all the production meet its goals.
In the weaknesses, the WWT should analyze what the company finds as hindrance to achievement of goals. They should focus on what the competitors who in this case are integrated systems companies are doing better than they are (Bohm, 2008). This gives WWT an oversight of the sectors that need improvement.
In the opportunities, the WWT evaluate the potential markets, changes and ventures they have put in place to enhance achievement of overall goals (Steiner, 1979). In addition, WWT should focus on the available opportunities in future that would assist the company to meet its goals.
In threats, WWT should focus on the risks associated with different sectors. This may include the markets due to competition, the human resource, finances, operations and other external factors such as politics and legal risks (Dealtry, 1992).
The company should evaluate how well they have dealt with these risks and how they are prepared to deal with their occurrence in future. This evaluation is necessary as risks hinder a company from achieving its goals.
In addition, WWT should focus on the external environmental factors that affect the company. The use of reliable source of information gives the company a good foundation in their analysis. The sources of environmental factors include the customers, suppliers, the media, trade associations, marketing intermediaries and the government agencies (Kazmi, 2002).
The company in addition should get information from secondary sources such as annual reports and newsletters of the competitors (Kazmi, 2002).
This information gives the company the overview of their external strengths, weaknesses, threats and the competitors’ information.
WWT should analyze this information, and plan a strategy to follow in maintaining and improving the strengths, turning the weaknesses to strengths, utilizing the available opportunities and overcoming the threats. A good strategic plan to deal with situation would help WWT to have a competitive advantage over its competitors.
Similarly, the company should focus on the internal factors that affect the company. The sources of these internal factors are WWT employees, the WWT files and documents, and WWT management information systems (Kazmi, 2002).
These sources give the company the overview of the internal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. WWT then carries its analysis with the understanding of this information, which further helps the company in strategic planning.
Conclusion
In any company analysis, a SWOT analysis helps to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated to the company should be the foundation. The analysis should focus on both the external and internal environmental factors.
References
Bohm, A. (2008). SWOT analysis. Norderstedt: Grin Verlag.
Dealtry, T. (1992). Dynamic SWOT analysis: Developer’s guide in managing real-time issue. Birmingham: DSA Publications.
Kazmi, A. (2002). Business policy and strategic management. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
Steiner, G. (1979). A step- by-step guide: Strategic planning. New York: The Free Press.