Strategic Analysis of Organisational Data and Information That Supports Decision-Making
Walmart has been long known in the retail industry as one of its undeniable leaders. Even minor issues in ethics and complications related to the criticisms that a range of people provide for its activities, Walmart continues to be successful in its chosen segment of the global market. However, by integrating better tools for organisational control and processing company-related information, Walmart’s leaders will take the company’s development to the next level and attract new audiences.
Business Level Strategy and Corporate Strategy
The strategy that Walmart currently uses as a business-level one consists of three items, which are the cost-efficient approach to financial management, product differentiation, and marketing geared toward specific groups of customers (Spicer & Hyatt, 2017). As Groeger, Bruce, and Rolfe (2019) explain, the organisation focuses explicitly on the identified issues since its business model is rooted in “price effects and volume effects” (p. 103).
Environmental Analysis
SWOT
The SWOT analysis shows that Walmart has control issues and problems in its PR and communication approaches. Overall, organisational decision-making occurs based on the preconditioned notions of cost-efficiency and the need to cater to the requirements of a specific segment of the population. As a result, the company fails to take into consideration the data that concerns its staff members and the difficulties that they face when working in the set conditions (Li & Liu, 2016).
Moreover, in its pursuit of low prices and increase in the amount of retailed products, Walmart has been ignoring the details that have led to significant controversies, such as selling questionable products, which include T-shirts with a “Gun Owner/Victim” sign on them (Roeder, 2019). The lack of a coherent standard for communication can be blamed for the observed problems.
PESTEL
Table 2. Walmart: PESTEL.
According to the results of the PESTEL analysis, Walmart could use a much better framework for building a competitive advantage. The issues that the company is currently experiencing are inextricably connected to its mismanagement of information and difficulties in its organisational decision-making. For instance, the fact that the company’s main competitive advantage has been wearing its welcome in the target market due to changes in consumers’ lifestyle choices should have been integrated into Walmart’s strategic decision-making, yet the company continues to exploit the same gimmick of cheap products
Porter’s 5 Forces
The analysis of Porter’s five forces that affect Walmart’s development also prove that the organisation could use a better framework for establishing feedback processing techniques within its system as the means of managing information related to its staff members and the levels of engagement among them. Currently, the company is largely affected by the possibility of increase in competition rates. As soon as its rivals, who have built a sustainable system of operations in the digital environment, gain enough momentum in the target setting, Walmart may lose a significant portion of its influence in the global economy (Mussa & Zhi Zhang, 2016).
In turn, problematic aspects of its employee management strategies caused by the inconsistencies in the communication system will make the organisation’s service quality drop (Liu, Luo, Huang, & Yang, 2017). Therefore, the bargaining power of buyers will rise as new competitors emerge, which will put Walmart under the threat of being outed from its present position of the retail leader (Mussa & Zhi Zhang, 2016). Moreover, the change in the company’s perception among its target customers will affect its chances at establishing presence in other countries quite negatively.
Resources and Competence Analysis
The availability of resources makes the foundation of a company’s capability to respond to alterations in its organisational environment and manage information effectively. Therefore, the assessment of Walmart’s resources is central to the evaluation of the organisation’s decision-making, as well as its capacity to communicate critical information to its employees and managers. The current external environment in which the organisation operates is characterised by a multitude of technological innovations and the strong propensity toward moving to the digital market (Schleper, Blome, & Wuttke, 2017).
Therefore, Walmart could make quite efficient use of the approaches that would guarantee it a seamless transition to the use of digital tools as the means of keeping communication consistent and performing decision-making based solely on the factors that facilitate the company’s functioning in the target market.
In this context, Walmart will also need to update its staff members’ competencies in digital information management. By transitioning to a new framework of data management, the company will have to educate its members to utilise digital data storage and transfer tools in the way that will benefit the company. Thus, overall, the results of the competitive analysis are indicative of the need to introduce an immediate change into the firm’s approach toward organisational decision-making and communicating information within the firm.
While Walmart has succeeded in cementing its image as that one of a company with the lowest product prices and acceptable quality, it is time for Walmart to move past the well-trodden path and focus on a more effective data management framework for more effective decision-making.
Strategy Plan
Company’s Mission
In order to gain a greater influence in the global economy and retain its reputation of a retail industry leader in the American one, Walmart will need to transfer to the digital framework for data management and improve its decision-making approach to incorporate ethical considerations. Thus, the organisation will avoid embarrassments such as the T-shirt scandal mentioned above (Roeder, 2019).
For this reason, the mission of the organisation will need to be tweaked to include appropriate ethical principles and ideas. At present, Walmart represents its mission as providing “a wide assortment of good-quality merchandise; the lowest possible prices; guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy; friendly, knowledgeable service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience” (“Walmart.com’s history and mission,” 2019). Being customer-cantered, the mission in question seems to lack the emphasis on other stakeholders’ needs.
The organisation also has a side mission that it also strives to accomplish. The specified addition is much more focused on the introduction of technological and digital innovations into the set of services offered to the company’s customers: “In short, Walmart.com is passionate about combining the best of two great worlds – technology and world-class retailing” (“Walmart.com’s history and mission,” 2019). Therefore, the current developments in the organisation’s setting point to positive change, yet innovative technologies also have to be introduced into the realm of organisational management and data sharing.
Strategic Directions
The strategic course that the company should take in the nearest future is the focus on the continuous, uninterrupted dialogue between its stakeholders. These include not only customer relationships but also the communication between Walmart and its employees, as well as suppliers, investors, and shareholders. Although the integration of the FRID data management framework can be regarded as an important step in advancing Walmart’s progress, the drastic lack of focus on the aspects that make the company open to external threats is the source of concern.
Strategic Controls Evaluation
The issue of control is, perhaps, the point of the greatest importance for Walmart at present. As the recent scandal with T-shirts has shown, it is imperative for Walmart to be able to track down the instances of inappropriate products being offered by suppliers to be sold at Walmart’s locations (Roeder, 2019). The current strategic controls used for data management and product filtering seem to be quite ineffective since they do not allow locating the cases of poor decision-making or miscommunication within the environment of the organisation. The same problem concerns the management of employees’ needs and the misrepresentation thereof in the corporate environment.
As research has shown, Walmart addresses only the basic needs of its staff members, often being quite dismissive toward their culture-specific demands (Kaelberer, 2017). While the described perspective allows the company to maintain its production volume high and its management processes consistent, it also leads to dissatisfaction building in staff members, causing them to lose their engagement in the company’s mission, and showing lower performance rates (Koca-Helvaci, 2015).
Therefore, Walmart has to redesign its approach to controlling its strategic communication and data management. The new framework for strategic controlling will need to identify changes in employees’ engagement through involving them in the dialogue with the company. A new system of a reciprocal conversation with the company represented by an improved communication channel will have to be established at Walmart.
In addition, the issue of offering customers inappropriate products and getting involved in ethically dubious cases has to be addressed at Walmart. For this purpose, the tracking system that could assist in indicating the cases of inappropriate products has to be placed into the company’s framework. The current strategic controls rely fully on an automated system, which allows saving time, yet reduces the efficiency of control (Loomis, 2018).
Therefore, a dual system that involves both machine and human control will be needed. Specifically, jobs that require locating inappropriate products and eliminating them from the product lien will have to be introduced into the company’s operation management. For this purpose, a communication system that will allow informing every participant about the instance of a problematic issue emerging within the company’s environment has to be developed.
Objectives and KPIs
Given the complicated issue of data management within Walmart, several key objectives have to be established at present. Moreover, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) will need to be set for the company to follow. Thus, the organisation will achieve more effective decision-making and manage its performance better. In addition to the existing KPIs, several ones addressing the communication issue will have to be added.
Table 3. Walmart: Suggested KPIs.
Place of Strategic Control: Evaluation
Current Approach: Weaknesses and Strengths
Although Walmart already has an established framework for strategic control, it could use a number of improvements. The company currently uses the approach known as strategic surveillance to control its internal processes and manage data properly, which includes placing tags on products, labelling them, and performing other tasks associated with sorting and management of goods (Formby, Malhotra, & Ahire, 2018). Although the described system seems to have been working relatively well, recent issues such as the introduction of inappropriate products into retail has affected the company’s reputation (Mullakhmetov, Sadriev, Gabidinova, & Akhmetshin, 2016).
Therefore, the inclusion of human control along with mechanical one will need to be considered as a necessity (Hamilton & Benjamin, 2019). The main weakness of the current strategic control is the lack of opportunity to evaluate products based on their cultural context and meaning. However, the utilised tool also has the benefit of making the product sorting and labelling very quickly. Given the company’s priorities concerning the provision of fast and cheap services, the control tool seems appropriate, yet the introduction of supervision over the products introduced into retail will also be necessary to prevent the instances mentioned above.
Strategy Implementation Plan
The process of implementing the changes to the current communication and decision-making frameworks will need to follow the theoretical framework of Kotter’s 8-Step Model. Using the specified tool will help HR managers to assist employees in adjusting to the new approach toward quality management and communication. Likewise, managers will also have to develop the skills and competencies required to provide immediate responses to the feedback supplied by employees and introduce immediate measures for correcting the situation.
For the plan to be implemented successfully and be accepted by all of the company’s members, the person performing the functions of the leader will have to combine two strategies in managing the change within the organisational context. Specifically, the Organisational Change Approach will need to be placed into the organisational context together with the Collaborative Approach and the Cultural Approach. While the Organisational Change framework will help to establish the set long-term objectives and focus on the introduction of crucial corporate values for employees to integrate into their decision-making and communication, the Collaborative Approach will lead to better information management, with the focus on data sharing and cooperation causing a gradual improvement (Vaara, Sonenshein, & Boje, 2016).
Finally, the Cultural Approach will help a manager to understand the demands and needs of employees better in order to improve the present HRM framework. Although, regarding the latter issue, the general direction is already visible since the demands toward staff’s performance have grown out of proportions, a more detailed analysis of employees’ culture-specific needs is still required. Since the volume of work and the number of responsibilities are unlikely to drop in eth nearest future, Walmart will have to make concessions for its staff members in order to increase employee motivation and engagement, as well as attract new staff members and relieve the pressure of responsibilities form the current staff partially.
Using the 5Cs of Strategy Execution will also be necessary to make the transition from the current framework of communicating with Walmart’s key stakeholders to the new and improved one much easier. Likewise, the transfer to a new approach toward quality control that will involve the assessment of products’ content along with their functionality will become smoother with the incorporation of the 5CS framework. In Walmart’s context, the model will be implemented by introducing simple tasks involving the use of improved communication tools as the means of enhancing the causality of their use (Kumar & Sharma, 2017).
The discussions that will precede the implementation of strategies and the following analysis of their effects, in turn, will provide a gateway to introducing criticality into the decision-making processes. Moreover, discussions of the newly developed and adopted values with staff members will show whether these values are compatible with employees’ philosophies and perspectives. The promotion of corporate standards and the introduction of monitoring and reporting systems will help to build continuity, whereas the reconsideration of corporate guidelines and their simplification will lead to clarity.
It is believed that the implementation plan outlined above will lead to an increase in employee engagement levels due to the increased opportunities for receiving feedback from staff members and improving the workplace environment in which they perform their routine functions.
Communication Tools: Internal and External Stakeholders
Since the enhancement of communication is currently seen as the essential priority for Walmart, appropriate tools will have to be introduced to communicate corporate values, essential guidelines, and other important messages. A fast communication channel will be of use when noticing problems in the social or cultural context of the products that Walmart will offer to its buyers. Therefore, strategies based on surveys and questionnaires should be included into the communication process. The internal communication channel that will allow receiving information about workplace issues and provide quick feedback will be necessary to appease staff members and keep the levels of internal stakeholders’ motivation high.
In turn, the application of a feedback system that will help to build the dialogue with consumers, suppliers, business partners, and shareholders will be crucial as well. The specified external system of communication can be supported by advertisements and websites where customers can leave their feedback. Suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders will require a different treatment based on prompt responses via e-mail or other communication tools. Once the strategy for the reciprocal dialogue is established, Walmart will be able to maintain the quality of its performance at a decent level, keeping its position in the retail market.
Monitoring and Evaluation Systems
As shown in the projected KPIs described above, Walmart has to integrate control tools into its communication and decision-making systems. Thus, the firm will ensure that its values and ethical principles are being followed by employees and managers when making choices related to the production processes, organisational issues, customer relations, and other relevant concerns. An approach based on daily reports and monthly audits will help to identify new problems in the company’s functioning and integrate models for correcting the errors that have led to the observed situation.
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