Operational Strengths and Organizational Culture
The first strength of Pixar in terms of operations is the team’s atmosphere. It is upbeat and friendly, which is why it enables fast problem-solving activities and creative decision-making. The drawback of the operation is that it relies solely on the Disney brand name for promotion. In contrast, the Pixar brand is strong enough to conduct its own promotional activities as well.
Brand Dependence and Administrative Challenges
Although the Disney brand is an advantage for marketing, a developed dependence on this brand name creates financing challenges for the company. The organization’s strength lies in its vision and mission, which are powerfully incorporated into the company culture, making general administration more effective. Nonetheless, some of the external communications are operated by Disney structures.
Human Resources and Technological Capabilities
Pixar has a university that is a vital asset for preparing company-oriented candidates. The weakness in human resources would be the work limit set at 50 hours per week. This might also be an advantage since employees rarely experience burnout in the workplace. Pixar continually develops new software to enhance the production of animated movies, a strong suit in the technology industry. However, some software programs used in the organization replace humans, which sometimes leads to complaints from former employees and loss of creativity provided by people.
Core Competencies
The core competency of Pixar is technological advancement in 3D, which enables the company to create the best animations. The reason behind this is that Pixar’s 3D animations were the most commercially successful and were used in the production of famous Disney movies.
Strategic Performance Objectives
For effective business monitoring and management, the following objectives have been developed (Kaplan & Norton, 2001):
- Monitoring of business processes: Enhancing Pixar’s brand name through all possible promotion channels to gain marketing independence from Disney within five years.
- Operational Process Monitoring: Creating more effective finance channels to increase general income by 10% annually till the end of this year.
- Customer Service Monitoring: Attracting more customers to Pixar products and increasing the number by at least 10% every year for five years.
- Monitoring of innovations and educational prospects: Legal patent of every new software that is potentially commercially successful to the Pixar brand within one year.
Table 1 – Value Chain Analysis
Table 2 – Balanced Scorecard
Reference
Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (2001). Transforming the balanced scorecard from performance measurement to strategic management: Part 1. Accounting Horizons, 15(1), 87-104.