Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Barkerville Gold Mines is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – there is backlash against globalization, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, increasing commodity prices, wage bills are increasing, increasing household debt because of falling income levels,
talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Barkerville Gold Mines
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Barkerville Gold Mines can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Barkerville Gold Mines, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Barkerville Gold Mines
2. Improving business portfolio management of Barkerville Gold Mines
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United States
4. Making a Gold & Silver sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Barkerville Gold Mines
Strengths of Barkerville Gold Mines | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Barkerville Gold Mines are -
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Barkerville Gold Mines in the Basic Materials sector have low bargaining power. Barkerville Gold Mines has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Barkerville Gold Mines to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Barkerville Gold Mines has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Barkerville Gold Mines staying ahead in the Gold & Silver industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Organizational Resilience of Barkerville Gold Mines
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Barkerville Gold Mines does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Barkerville Gold Mines is one of the leading players in the Gold & Silver industry in United States. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in United States. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Diverse revenue streams
– Barkerville Gold Mines is present in almost all the verticals within the Gold & Silver industry. This has provided Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in Gold & Silver industry
– Barkerville Gold Mines has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Barkerville Gold Mines to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the Gold & Silver industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Barkerville Gold Mines to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Strong track record of project management in the Gold & Silver industry
– Barkerville Gold Mines is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
High brand equity
– Barkerville Gold Mines has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Barkerville Gold Mines to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Digital Transformation in Gold & Silver industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Barkerville Gold Mines digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Learning organization
- Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Barkerville Gold Mines emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Innovation driven organization
– Barkerville Gold Mines is one of the most innovative firm in Gold & Silver sector.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Weaknesses of Barkerville Gold Mines | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Barkerville Gold Mines are -
Employees’ less understanding of Barkerville Gold Mines strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Barkerville Gold Mines 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, Barkerville Gold Mines has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Gold & Silver industry over the last five years. Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Barkerville Gold Mines has some of the most successful models in the Gold & Silver industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. Barkerville Gold Mines should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Need for greater diversity
– Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Barkerville Gold Mines needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Gold & Silver industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Barkerville Gold Mines can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Barkerville Gold Mines is planning to shift buying processes online.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Barkerville Gold Mines has high operating costs in the Gold & Silver industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Barkerville Gold Mines lucrative customers.
Skills based hiring in Gold & Silver industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Barkerville Gold Mines is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Gold & Silver industry, but Barkerville Gold Mines needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Barkerville Gold Mines to focus more on services in the Gold & Silver industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of United States, Barkerville Gold Mines needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Barkerville Gold Mines has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Gold & Silver industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
High dependence on Barkerville Gold Mines ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Barkerville Gold Mines still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Gold & Silver industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Barkerville Gold Mines has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Barkerville Gold Mines Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Barkerville Gold Mines are -
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Gold & Silver industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Barkerville Gold Mines 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. Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Barkerville Gold Mines 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, Barkerville Gold Mines can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Barkerville Gold Mines operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Gold & Silver 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 Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Loyalty marketing
– Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Buying journey improvements
– Barkerville Gold Mines can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Gold & Silver 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.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Barkerville Gold Mines in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Gold & Silver industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Barkerville Gold Mines to increase its market reach. Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Manufacturing automation
– Barkerville Gold Mines can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Gold & Silver 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.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Barkerville Gold Mines has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Gold & Silver industry. This can help Barkerville Gold Mines to build a more holistic ecosystem for Barkerville Gold Mines products in the Gold & Silver industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Threats Barkerville Gold Mines External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Barkerville Gold Mines are -
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Barkerville Gold Mines is facing in Gold & Silver 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 Gold & Silver industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Barkerville Gold Mines can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Regulatory challenges
– Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Gold & Silver industry regulations.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Barkerville Gold Mines in Gold & Silver industry. The Gold & Silver 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.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
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.
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. Barkerville Gold Mines needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Gold & Silver industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Barkerville Gold Mines has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Gold & Silver industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Barkerville Gold Mines needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Gold & Silver 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
– Barkerville Gold Mines 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. Barkerville Gold Mines can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Gold & Silver industry.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines prominent markets.
Increasing wage structure of Barkerville Gold Mines
– 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 Barkerville Gold Mines.
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. Barkerville Gold Mines 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.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Barkerville Gold Mines Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines 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 Barkerville Gold Mines needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
