Wide Open Agriculture (WOA) SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / MBA Resources
Crops
Strategy / MBA Resources
Introduction to SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Wide Open Agriculture (Australia)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Wide Open Agriculture is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, increasing energy prices, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google,
there is increasing trade war between United States & China, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Wide Open Agriculture
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Wide Open Agriculture can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Wide Open Agriculture, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Wide Open Agriculture
2. Improving business portfolio management of Wide Open Agriculture
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Australia
4. Making a Crops sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Wide Open Agriculture
Strengths of Wide Open Agriculture | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Wide Open Agriculture are -
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Wide Open Agriculture has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Wide Open Agriculture staying ahead in the Crops industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Wide Open Agriculture in the Consumer/Non-Cyclical sector have low bargaining power. Wide Open Agriculture has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Wide Open Agriculture to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Wide Open Agriculture is one of the leading players in the Crops industry in Australia. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in Australia. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Innovation driven organization
– Wide Open Agriculture is one of the most innovative firm in Crops sector.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Wide Open Agriculture has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Crops industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Wide Open Agriculture have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Wide Open Agriculture comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Crops industry, building diversified operations across different geographies so that disruption in one part of the world doesn’t impact the overall performance of the firm, and integrating the various business operations and processes through its digital transformation drive.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Wide Open Agriculture are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
Organizational Resilience of Wide Open Agriculture
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Wide Open Agriculture does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Learning organization
- Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Wide Open Agriculture emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Wide Open Agriculture has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Wide Open Agriculture in Crops industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Analytics focus
– Wide Open Agriculture is putting a lot of focus on utilizing the power of analytics in business decision making. This has put it among the leading players in the Crops industry. The technology infrastructure of Australia is also helping it to harness the power of analytics for – marketing optimization, demand forecasting, customer relationship management, inventory management, information sharing across the value chain etc.
Weaknesses of Wide Open Agriculture | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Wide Open Agriculture are -
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Wide Open Agriculture has high operating costs in the Crops industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Wide Open Agriculture lucrative customers.
Skills based hiring in Crops industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Wide Open Agriculture 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.
Lack of clear differentiation of Wide Open Agriculture products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Wide Open Agriculture needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Wide Open Agriculture is one of the leading players in the Crops industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Crops industry in last five years.
High dependence on Wide Open Agriculture ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Wide Open Agriculture still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Crops industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Wide Open Agriculture has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Crops industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in Australia, Wide Open Agriculture is facing high bargaining power of the channel partners. So far it has not able to streamline the operations to reduce the bargaining power of the value chain partners in the Crops industry.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Wide Open Agriculture has borrowed money from the capital market at higher rates. It needs to restructure the interest payment and costs so that it can compete better and improve profitability.
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Wide Open Agriculture is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Crops industry, but Wide Open Agriculture needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Wide Open Agriculture to focus more on services in the Crops industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Wide Open Agriculture needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Crops industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Wide Open Agriculture can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Wide Open Agriculture is planning to shift buying processes online.
Employees’ less understanding of Wide Open Agriculture strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Wide Open Agriculture 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.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Wide Open Agriculture has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Crops industry over the last five years. Wide Open Agriculture 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.
Wide Open Agriculture Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Wide Open Agriculture are -
Manufacturing automation
– Wide Open Agriculture can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Crops sector. It can use CAD and 3D printing to build a quick prototype and pilot testing products. It can leverage automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence to do faster production at lowers costs, and it can leverage the growth in satellite and tracking technologies to improve inventory management, transportation, and shipping.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Crops industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Wide Open Agriculture 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. Wide Open Agriculture 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.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Wide Open Agriculture to expand its talent hiring zone. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 20% of the high end workforce in fields such as finance, information technology, can continously work from remote local post Covid-19. This presents a really great opportunity for Wide Open Agriculture to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Wide Open Agriculture can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Wide Open Agriculture has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Crops industry. This can help Wide Open Agriculture to build a more holistic ecosystem for Wide Open Agriculture products in the Crops industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Buying journey improvements
– Wide Open Agriculture can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Crops 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.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Wide Open Agriculture 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.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Wide Open Agriculture to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Wide Open Agriculture can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Wide Open Agriculture operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Crops sector.
Loyalty marketing
– Wide Open Agriculture has focused on building a highly responsive customer relationship management platform. This platform is built on in-house data and driven by analytics and artificial intelligence. The customer analytics can help the organization to fine tune its loyalty marketing efforts, increase the wallet share of the organization, reduce wastage on mainstream advertising spending, build better pricing strategies using personalization, etc.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Wide Open Agriculture in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Crops industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Wide Open Agriculture 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 Crops industry.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Wide Open Agriculture is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Wide Open Agriculture can utilize new technology in the field of Crops industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Threats Wide Open Agriculture External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Wide Open Agriculture are -
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Wide Open Agriculture may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Crops sector.
Regulatory challenges
– Wide Open Agriculture 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 Crops industry regulations.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Wide Open Agriculture demand
– There is a high probability of declining consumer confidence, given – high inflammation rate, rise of gig economy, lower job stability, increasing cost of living, higher interest rates, and aging demography. All the factors contribute to people saving higher rate of their income, resulting in lower consumer demand in Crops industry and other sectors.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Wide Open Agriculture has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Crops industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Wide Open Agriculture needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Crops 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.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture prominent markets.
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.
New competition
– After the dotcom bust of 2001, financial crisis of 2008-09, the business formation in US economy had declined. But in 2020 alone, there are more than 1.5 million new business applications in United States. This can lead to greater competition for Wide Open Agriculture in the Crops sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Environmental challenges
– Wide Open Agriculture 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. Wide Open Agriculture can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Crops industry.
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Wide Open Agriculture can face lack of demand in the market place because of Fed actions to reduce inflation. This can lead to sluggish growth in the economy, lower demands, lower investments, higher borrowing costs, and consolidation in the Crops industry.
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 Wide Open Agriculture business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Wide Open Agriculture will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Crops industry are lowering. It can presents Wide Open Agriculture with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Crops sector.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Crops industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Wide Open Agriculture can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Wide Open Agriculture Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture 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 Wide Open Agriculture needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.