SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for FII Excellence (Brazil)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , FII Excellence is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, there is backlash against globalization, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, increasing household debt because of falling income levels,
talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, 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 FII Excellence can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the FII Excellence, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of FII Excellence
2. Improving business portfolio management of FII Excellence
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Brazil
4. Making a NA sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of FII Excellence
Strengths of FII Excellence | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of FII Excellence are -
Training and development
– FII Excellence has one of the best training and development program in NA 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.
High brand equity
– FII Excellence has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled FII Excellence to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Innovation driven organization
– FII Excellence is one of the most innovative firm in NA sector.
Learning organization
- FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at FII Excellence emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Ability to lead change in NA
– FII Excellence is one of the leading players in the NA industry in Brazil. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the NA industry in Brazil but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled FII Excellence in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of FII Excellence comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the NA 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.
Successful track record of launching new products
– FII Excellence has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. FII Excellence 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)
– FII Excellence has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – FII Excellence staying ahead in the NA industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Diverse revenue streams
– FII Excellence is present in almost all the verticals within the NA industry. This has provided FII Excellence 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.
Ability to recruit top talent
– FII Excellence is one of the leading players in the NA industry in Brazil. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in Brazil. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of FII Excellence in NA industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Highly skilled collaborators
– FII Excellence has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive NA industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of FII Excellence have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Weaknesses of FII Excellence | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of FII Excellence are -
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, FII Excellence is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help FII Excellence to provide better information regarding NA products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Lack of clear differentiation of FII Excellence products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, FII Excellence needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As FII Excellence is one of the leading players in the NA industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the NA industry in last five years.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, FII Excellence has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the NA industry using digital technology.
High dependence on FII Excellence ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of FII Excellence still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in NA industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though FII Excellence has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Need for greater diversity
– FII Excellence 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.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the NA industry, FII Excellence needs to come up with a strategy to reduce the workers concern regarding automation. Without a clear strategy, it could lead to disruption and uncertainty within the organization.
Employees’ less understanding of FII Excellence strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of FII Excellence 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.
No frontier risks strategy
– From the 10K / annual statement of FII Excellence, it seems that company is thinking out the frontier risks that can impact NA 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.
Skills based hiring in NA industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at FII Excellence 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.
Products dominated business model
– Even though FII Excellence has some of the most successful models in the NA industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. FII Excellence should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
FII Excellence Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of FII Excellence are -
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for FII Excellence 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.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in NA industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. FII Excellence can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help FII Excellence to increase its market reach. FII Excellence 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.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects FII Excellence can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, FII Excellence is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. FII Excellence can utilize new technology in the field of NA industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at FII Excellence 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 NA industry.
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 FII Excellence 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– FII Excellence 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.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, FII Excellence 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.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Loyalty marketing
– FII Excellence 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.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in NA industry
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for FII Excellence in the NA industry. Now FII Excellence can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Manufacturing automation
– FII Excellence can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in NA 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.
Threats FII Excellence External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of FII Excellence are -
Regulatory challenges
– FII Excellence 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 NA industry regulations.
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 FII Excellence in the NA sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– FII Excellence high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to NA industry are lowering. It can presents FII Excellence with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the NA sector.
Increasing wage structure of FII Excellence
– 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 FII Excellence.
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. FII Excellence needs to understand the core reasons impacting the NA industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
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 FII Excellence.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– FII Excellence has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the NA industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, FII Excellence needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the NA 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, FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence 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.
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– FII Excellence 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 NA industry.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that FII Excellence is facing in NA sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in NA industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence 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 FII Excellence needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.