SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Silver Heritage (Australia)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Silver Heritage is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – increasing energy prices, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , wage bills are increasing, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, increasing transportation and logistics costs, geopolitical disruptions, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings,
customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, etc
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Silver Heritage can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Silver Heritage, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Silver Heritage operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of Silver Heritage can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Silver Heritage
2. Improving business portfolio management of Silver Heritage
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Australia
4. Making a Casinos & Gaming sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Silver Heritage
Strengths of Silver Heritage | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Silver Heritage are -
Highly skilled collaborators
– Silver Heritage has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Casinos & Gaming industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Silver Heritage have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Strong track record of project management in the Casinos & Gaming industry
– Silver Heritage is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Ability to lead change in Casinos & Gaming
– Silver Heritage is one of the leading players in the Casinos & Gaming industry in Australia. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the Casinos & Gaming industry in Australia but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Silver Heritage in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Innovation driven organization
– Silver Heritage is one of the most innovative firm in Casinos & Gaming sector.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Silver Heritage has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Silver Heritage has effective processes in place that helps in exploring new product needs, doing quick pilot testing, and then launching the products quickly using its extensive distribution network.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Silver Heritage has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Silver Heritage staying ahead in the Casinos & Gaming industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Diverse revenue streams
– Silver Heritage is present in almost all the verticals within the Casinos & Gaming industry. This has provided Silver Heritage a diverse revenue stream that has helped it to survive disruptions such as global pandemic in Covid-19, financial disruption of 2008, and supply chain disruption of 2021.
Learning organization
- Silver Heritage is a learning organization. It has inculcated three key characters of learning organization in its processes and operations – exploration, creativity, and expansiveness. The work place at Silver Heritage is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Silver Heritage emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
High brand equity
– Silver Heritage has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Silver Heritage to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Training and development
– Silver Heritage has one of the best training and development program in Services industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Digital Transformation in Casinos & Gaming industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Silver Heritage digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Silver Heritage has successfully integrated the four key components of digital transformation – digital integration in processes, digital integration in marketing and customer relationship management, digital integration into the value chain, and using technology to explore new products and market opportunities.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Silver Heritage in Casinos & Gaming industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Weaknesses of Silver Heritage | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Silver Heritage are -
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Silver Heritage needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Casinos & Gaming industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Silver Heritage can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Silver Heritage is planning to shift buying processes online.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Australia, Silver Heritage needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Employees’ less understanding of Silver Heritage strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Silver Heritage don’t have comprehensive understanding of the firm’s strategy. This is reflected in number of promotional campaigns over the last few years that had mixed messaging and competing priorities. Some of the strategic activities and services promoted in the promotional campaigns were not consistent with the organization’s strategy.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative at Silver Heritage, in the dynamic environment of Casinos & Gaming industry it has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Silver Heritage has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
High dependence on Silver Heritage ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Silver Heritage still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Casinos & Gaming industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Silver Heritage has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Skills based hiring in Casinos & Gaming industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Silver Heritage has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Silver Heritage is one of the leading players in the Casinos & Gaming industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Casinos & Gaming industry in last five years.
Need for greater diversity
– Silver Heritage has taken concrete steps on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the efforts so far has resulted in limited success. It needs to expand the recruitment and selection process to hire more people from the minorities and underprivileged background.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Silver Heritage is just above the Casinos & Gaming industry average. It needs to redesign the compensation structure and incentives to increase the revenue per employees. Some of the steps that it can take are – hiring more specialists on project basis, etc.
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Silver Heritage is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Casinos & Gaming industry, but Silver Heritage needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Silver Heritage to focus more on services in the Casinos & Gaming industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Silver Heritage has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Casinos & Gaming industry over the last five years. Silver Heritage even though has strong showing on digital transformation primary two stages, it has struggled to capitalize the power of digital transformation in marketing efforts and new venture efforts.
Silver Heritage Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Silver Heritage are -
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Silver Heritage can still utilize the low interest rates to borrow money for capital investment. Secondly it can also use the increase of government spending in infrastructure projects to get new business.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Casinos & Gaming industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Silver Heritage can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Silver Heritage can build a diversified supply chain model across various countries in - South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world. This reconfiguration of global supply chain can help Silver Heritage to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Silver Heritage to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Silver Heritage can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Silver Heritage to increase its market reach. Silver Heritage will be able to reach out to new customers. Secondly 5G will also provide technology framework to build new tools and products that can help more immersive consumer experience and faster consumer journey.
Buying journey improvements
– Silver Heritage can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Casinos & Gaming industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. It can provide automated chats to help consumers solve their own problems, provide online suggestions to get maximum out of the products and services, and help consumers to build a community where they can interact with each other to develop new features and uses.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Silver Heritage can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Silver Heritage can make experimentation a productive activity and build a culture of innovation using approaches such as – mining transaction data, A/B testing of websites and selling platforms, engaging potential customers over various needs, and building on small ideas in the Casinos & Gaming industry.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Silver Heritage has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Casinos & Gaming industry. This can help Silver Heritage to build a more holistic ecosystem for Silver Heritage products in the Casinos & Gaming industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Silver Heritage has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Casinos & Gaming sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Silver Heritage to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Silver Heritage to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Casinos & Gaming industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Silver Heritage can take advantage of these changes in consumer behavior to build a far more efficient business model. For example consumer regular ordering of products can reduce both last mile delivery costs and market penetration costs. Silver Heritage can further use this consumer data to build better customer loyalty, provide better products and service collection, and improve the value proposition in inflationary times.
Identify volunteer opportunities
– Covid-19 has impacted working population in two ways – it has led to people soul searching about their professional choices, resulting in mass resignation. Secondly it has encouraged people to do things that they are passionate about. This has opened opportunities for businesses to build volunteer oriented socially driven projects. Silver Heritage can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Threats Silver Heritage External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Silver Heritage are -
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Silver Heritage may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Casinos & Gaming sector.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Silver Heritage is facing in Casinos & Gaming sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Silver Heritage business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Increasing wage structure of Silver Heritage
– Post Covid-19 there is a sharp increase in the wages especially in the jobs that require interaction with people. The increasing wages can put downward pressure on the margins of Silver Heritage.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Silver Heritage in Casinos & Gaming industry. The Casinos & Gaming industry is already at various protected from local competition in China, with the rise of trade war the protection levels may go up. This presents a clear threat of current business model in Chinese market.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Silver Heritage.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Silver Heritage has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Casinos & Gaming industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Silver Heritage needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Casinos & Gaming sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
Environmental challenges
– Silver Heritage needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Silver Heritage can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Casinos & Gaming industry.
Regulatory challenges
– Silver Heritage needs to prepare for regulatory challenges as consumer protection groups and other pressure groups are vigorously advocating for more regulations on big business - to reduce inequality, to create a level playing field, to product data privacy and consumer privacy, to reduce the influence of big money on democratic institutions, etc. This can lead to significant changes in the Casinos & Gaming industry regulations.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Casinos & Gaming industry are lowering. It can presents Silver Heritage with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Casinos & Gaming sector.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Silver Heritage can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate Silver Heritage prominent markets.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Silver Heritage Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Silver Heritage needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of Silver Heritage is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of Silver Heritage is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of Silver Heritage to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Silver Heritage needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.