The orange company
In business one of the most flexible variable in and organisations long-term profitability is its strategy. Here are different conceptual generalizations that attempt to describe what a strategy is.
The most universal of these suggests that a strategy is a description of how an organization intends to manipulate and utilize its available resources to succeed amidst the whims of the competitive market. Success in the general business context can be held to mean substantial shareholder return as well as peaceful and ethical operations within the country legislative regime (Kolb, 1976).
Generally a company’s strategy entails a critical and analytical evaluation of the company from a functional approach. It therefore embraces a number of decisions made in various departmental areas of the organization. The objective here is to ensure that every effort made within the strategy leads to an increase in shareholder value.
The decisions stemming from this strategy are then implemented through further delibarettion of the decisions at lower levels of the Organization. The most important virtue in this whole process is consistency. The more consistent the decisions within a strategy the better it becomes
At the functional level the main strategies are formulated on six main levels. These include marketing, product development, operations, finance, human resources as well as the information technology function. From these segmentations two main divisions of decisions are formulated.
These majorly focus on either operations or investment. Decisions concerned with operations involve the short term achievements of the firm within the current markets. Investment options on the other hand critically evaluate the firm’s position in as far as future investment opportunities are concerned.
The firm is essentially broken into a number of functions. The different organizations may brand their functions differently but the main generic divisions include marketing, product development, operations, finance, human resources as well as information technology. Organizations have a wide variety of strategic approaches and methods in which they may develop their strategy.
These techniques include the Just-In-Time and Total Quality Management. The objective of these strategies is to ensure that all the basic functions of the organizations work together. The test for the efficiency of this strategy is majorly based on the ability of the functions to collectively contribute to the overall strategy
Within 30 months of its launch the Orange Company’s Business Services segment has acquired world wide fame as a worldwide business provider. This has added to the already existing global leadership on the business to business market. It has managed to maintain a stable and consistent command of the market factors using these to steer its profitability rates.
The secret behind this success has been through its carefully elected and developed functional strategies. The process of development entails the translation of the overall strategy into subdivisions in the form of other strategies that are easy to adopt and implement at the functional level. They are majorly constructed in the form of shorter term goals as well as a tactical time frame set for the accomplishment of these sub strategies.
The company has adjusted its enterprise line of business making it into the main tool for driving the company to unmatched levels in the Orange business to business strategy. Its main strong holds have been on its financial portfolio as well as an aggressive outreach to its consumer base by maintaining and efficient customers care.
The process of leveraging the strong dynamic of Orange Business Services as well as a sustained domestic business to business activity profile within the countries in which it offers its services. The analysis results to the development of a team that manages the creation and regulation of a market strategy.
The strategy mainly seeks to embrace the demands of the 3 C’s – customers, competitors and company. In the process it serves the best interests of the market as a whole. Concentration on a single segment allows the developed strategy to adapt to customer needs that fall within the defined the 4 P’s for each segment – product, price, promotion and place.
For instance the company opened a new customer solution center has in one of its main consumer base in Singapore. The main purpose of this new creation is to facilitate a demonstration to senior executives on methods and procedures that are necessary for flexible solutions and services that target particular business and industry concerns.
The company has gone out of its way to contradict trends in the ICT industry as well as the methods adopted by competitors in the market. The company has responded to the market trends and the need for a sharp edged management that is responsive to the contemporary market requirements. The mobile subscribers have a general trend of being influenced by a responsive service provider. It is therefore the obligation of the producer to maintain a high level of regard for the consumer’s needs as well as those of the industry.
The adoption of this approach led to an increase in the company’s revenue by a 2 % margin within a period of 9 months as shown in the graph below
The firm has also considered the benefits that accrue from telepresence. This strategy cuts travel time and costs and allows the company to reduce the impact on the environmental footprint. However this concept is not important to the organization unless it can be modified and adjusted to improve the speed of decision making involved in the process of research and development.
In fact the concept allows people within various regions to engage in a multi-region marketing team with members with a membership that draws interest from various countries and client bases around the continent within a short span (Winther, 2009). In some cases it has been used on a weekly basis to coordinate the simultaneous coordination and management of the launch of new technology on a real-time basis without the bother of travelling across all these countries to facilitate this process.
The company has engaged in consumer based strategies in its business services segment winning its customers’ hearts and encaging their minds in their world class consumer relations and service that has targeted the consumers satisfaction as its main and only objective.
Statistics form Telemark Services one of the leading research firms and an authority on market analysis in as far as IT and telecommunication services is concerned has vouched for the company as the only supplier whose final product relates with the consumer on an emotional and rational level.
This has motivated a positive and aggressive demonstration of a high level of confidence by the consumer. This data was gathered from 745 interviews conducted in 2009 from a sample of consumers in the telecommunication market.
The company has also engaged in strategic alliances that are aimed at maintaining a competitive edge in the volatile technological environment. The company has entered into a partnership with Cisco, EMC and VMware to create an alliance dubbed Flexible 4 Business (Porter, 1985). This alliance is an attempt at providing convenience to the consumer in as far as business is concerned. The Telecoms industry market and service structure has grown tremendously over the years.
This advancement may be associated with the major technological advancements in the field of innovations alongside an aggressive and increasing customer demands for more a high degree of flexibility as well as converged services that can be easily and conveniently accessed from a single device.
The market has grown even more sophisticated with the consumers falling for those services that can be accessed from more than one device (Matias, 2007). The rate at which internet based new technologies have invaded the market with specific regard to the mobile market has allowed them to penetrate the market with much more vigor.
It has also created room for new and modern service providers to offer new and value creating services that can all be offered all in one go. These groupings no longer require the individualized access procedures allowing the consumer to be more flexible. The demand for internet based products is actually expected to grow exponentially over the next few years as indicated by the graph below.
It is this need that has motivated the need for a technology that offers an all inclusive package to the consumer. In the face of the new technological approach of cloud computing the company has used this partnership to further the prospects of tits benefits that include end-to-end computing services for enterprises.
The market responds very fast to nee technology and therefore the company has allowed a smooth transition for its customers to cloud computing and allowed them to take advantage of the flexibility gained form this infrastructure. The strategy also guarantees a reduction in the costs involved in transactions and convenience in the business world.
Aside from the radical technological innovations the comprehensive and liberal policies that have been set up to regulate the industry have created a comfortable environment for the entry into this market. As it were this presents more competition for the company and begs for a strategy that will allow it to maintain a head start in the market preferences (Johnson & Scholes, 1997).
The fierce competition has captured a significant portion of the market limiting the scope of expansion and reducing the rate at which the company’s profits grow. In the face of this state of affairs alongside the declining profits generated from voice and narrowband services the Flexible 4 Business cloud services portfolio seeks to increase the company’s market command and ensure diversify the company’s sources of income to avoid reliance on one line of production.
The partnership has resulted in the creation of a product that is contains infrastructure-as-a-service elucidation. This individualized product is created to consider support services and privacy targeted for the customer. It also considers many other services that ensure the customer with conveniences that allows operation of different devices and also smooth communication.
The company will therefore enjoy the benefits of having an IT service enterprise without having to create their own which would be an infeasible project at least within the next decade. The flexible 4 business portfolio will guarantee the company unlimited access to the convenient services of cloud computing and increase its product variety (Eynard, 1995). The company is therefore provided with an opportunity to offer end to end services with the close guidance and assistance from the best collection of technologies in the market.
The unification of these companies is a subjective approach that seeks to ensure that the market externalities and business loopholes that are created by market gaps. The cloud computing portfolio financed by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, allows the company to enjoy the added advantage of software and IT company without having to set up its own.
Orange Business Services seeks to take advantage of the end to- end service delivered from the by the use of cloud. The partnership brings together the very best breed of technologies in the market. The Flexible 4 Business alliance is the ultimate investment vehicle that integrates and pre-tests the firms strategies to ensure that they are tuned to deliver higher application performance across the enterprise (Chan-Olmsted & Jamison, 2001).
Conclusion
As convergence takes its toll in the telecoms industry, the players continue to adjust their strategies to align themselves with Next Generation business models he hope that they will keep afloat of the competition and also maintain a profitability index (Runhaar and Lafferty, 2007) .
The transition to these new technologies for companies such as Orange requires a great amount of planning and deliberation as well as adjustment of the company’s strategies to fit appropriately in this race. The company has continued to reinvent its product as its moves towards the convergence between the telecommunications industry and internet coverage. It is common ground that players in this industry have only to take a leap of faith in the adoption of the various strategies since the future in technology is very volatile.
References
Chan-Olmsted, S. & Jamison, M. ( 2001)Rivalry through alliances.Competitive Strategy in the Global Telecommunications Market. European Management Journal, 19(3), 317-331.
Eynard, C.(1995) A methodology for the performance evaluation of data query strategies in universal mobile telecommunication systems (UMTS). Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal.
Johnson, G.,& Scholes, K, (1997) Exploring Corporate Strategy. Prentice-Hall Europe.
Kolb, D. (1976) Management and the learning process. California Management Review Matias, R.(2007) Contested Resources :Unions Employers and the Adoption of New Work Practices in US and UK Telecmmunication. British Journal of Industrial Relations 45 495-517.
Porter M., (1985) Competitive Advantage. The Free Press, Runhaar, H. and Lafferty, H.(2007) Governing Corporate Social Responsibility: An Assessment of the Contribution of the UN Global Compact to CSR Strategies in the Telecommunications Industry. Journal of business ethics.
Winther, M. (2009) Telecom Services Excellence in Customer Care — WhoCares? The Orange Business Services Strategy to Manage by Customer Loyalty. The orange business. Available from https://www.orange-business.com/en