Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Adelaide Brighton ADR is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, technology disruption, there is backlash against globalization, increasing transportation and logistics costs, geopolitical disruptions, there is increasing trade war between United States & China,
increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Adelaide Brighton ADR
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Adelaide Brighton ADR can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Adelaide Brighton ADR, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Adelaide Brighton ADR
2. Improving business portfolio management of Adelaide Brighton ADR
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United States
4. Making a sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Adelaide Brighton ADR
Strengths of Adelaide Brighton ADR | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Adelaide Brighton ADR are -
Analytics focus
– Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 industry. The technology infrastructure of United States 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.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Adelaide Brighton ADR in the sector have low bargaining power. Adelaide Brighton ADR has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Adelaide Brighton ADR to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in industry
– Adelaide Brighton ADR has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Adelaide Brighton ADR to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Adelaide Brighton ADR to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Adelaide Brighton ADR has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Adelaide Brighton ADR have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Innovation driven organization
– Adelaide Brighton ADR is one of the most innovative firm in sector.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Adelaide Brighton ADR has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Adelaide Brighton ADR staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Training and development
– Adelaide Brighton ADR has one of the best training and development program in 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.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Adelaide Brighton ADR comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the 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.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Adelaide Brighton ADR in industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Learning organization
- Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Adelaide Brighton ADR emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Diverse revenue streams
– Adelaide Brighton ADR is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Weaknesses of Adelaide Brighton ADR | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Adelaide Brighton ADR are -
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Adelaide Brighton ADR has high operating costs in the industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Adelaide Brighton ADR lucrative customers.
Skills based hiring in industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Adelaide Brighton ADR is just above the 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.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of United States, Adelaide Brighton ADR needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Adelaide Brighton ADR has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Adelaide Brighton ADR is one of the leading players in the industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the industry in last five years.
High bargaining power of channel partners in industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in United States, Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 industry.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Adelaide Brighton ADR needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Adelaide Brighton ADR can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Adelaide Brighton ADR is planning to shift buying processes online.
High dependence on Adelaide Brighton ADR ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Adelaide Brighton ADR still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Adelaide Brighton ADR has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
No frontier risks strategy
– From the 10K / annual statement of Adelaide Brighton ADR, it seems that company is thinking out the frontier risks that can impact industry. But it has very little resources allocation to manage the risks emerging from events such as natural disasters, climate change, melting of permafrost, tacking the rise of artificial intelligence, opportunities and threats emerging from commercialization of space etc.
Lack of clear differentiation of Adelaide Brighton ADR products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Adelaide Brighton ADR needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Adelaide Brighton ADR Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Adelaide Brighton ADR are -
Loyalty marketing
– Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Adelaide Brighton ADR 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. Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Adelaide Brighton ADR has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Adelaide Brighton ADR to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Adelaide Brighton ADR to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in industry
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Adelaide Brighton ADR in the industry. Now Adelaide Brighton ADR can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Adelaide Brighton ADR to increase its market reach. Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Adelaide Brighton ADR in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Adelaide Brighton ADR can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Adelaide Brighton ADR can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Adelaide Brighton ADR operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in sector.
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 Adelaide Brighton ADR 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.
Threats Adelaide Brighton ADR External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Adelaide Brighton ADR are -
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Adelaide Brighton ADR has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Adelaide Brighton ADR needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the 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.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Adelaide Brighton ADR in industry. The 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Adelaide Brighton ADR can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
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. Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 industry are lowering. It can presents Adelaide Brighton ADR with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR prominent markets.
Increasing wage structure of Adelaide Brighton ADR
– 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR.
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.
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 Adelaide Brighton ADR in the sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Adelaide Brighton ADR is facing in sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Adelaide Brighton ADR may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of sector.
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 Adelaide Brighton ADR Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR 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 Adelaide Brighton ADR needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.