Guardant Health (GH) SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / MBA Resources
Healthcare Facilities
Strategy / MBA Resources
Introduction to SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Guardant Health (United States)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Guardant Health is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , wage bills are increasing, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, increasing transportation and logistics costs, increasing commodity prices, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google,
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 Guardant Health can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Guardant Health, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Guardant Health
2. Improving business portfolio management of Guardant Health
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United States
4. Making a Healthcare Facilities sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Guardant Health
Strengths of Guardant Health | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Guardant Health are -
Training and development
– Guardant Health has one of the best training and development program in Healthcare 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 Guardant Health comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Healthcare Facilities 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.
Innovation driven organization
– Guardant Health is one of the most innovative firm in Healthcare Facilities sector.
Analytics focus
– Guardant Health 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 Healthcare Facilities 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.
Organizational Resilience of Guardant Health
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Guardant Health does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Guardant Health has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Healthcare Facilities industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Guardant Health have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Learning organization
- Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Guardant Health emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Diverse revenue streams
– Guardant Health is present in almost all the verticals within the Healthcare Facilities industry. This has provided Guardant Health 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.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Guardant Health 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.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Guardant Health is one of the leading players in the Healthcare Facilities 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.
Digital Transformation in Healthcare Facilities industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Guardant Health digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Guardant Health 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.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in Healthcare Facilities industry
– Guardant Health has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Guardant Health to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the Healthcare Facilities industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Guardant Health to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Weaknesses of Guardant Health | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Guardant Health are -
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of United States, Guardant Health needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Guardant Health is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Guardant Health to provide better information regarding Healthcare Facilities products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Healthcare Facilities industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in United States, Guardant Health 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 Healthcare Facilities industry.
No frontier risks strategy
– From the 10K / annual statement of Guardant Health, it seems that company is thinking out the frontier risks that can impact Healthcare Facilities 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 Guardant Health products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Guardant Health needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Skills based hiring in Healthcare Facilities industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Healthcare Facilities industry, but Guardant Health needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Guardant Health to focus more on services in the Healthcare Facilities industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Guardant Health has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Healthcare Facilities 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 Guardant Health ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Guardant Health still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Healthcare Facilities industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Guardant Health has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Guardant Health is one of the leading players in the Healthcare Facilities industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Healthcare Facilities industry in last five years.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Guardant Health needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Healthcare Facilities industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Guardant Health can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Guardant Health is planning to shift buying processes online.
Guardant Health Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Guardant Health are -
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Guardant Health in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Healthcare Facilities industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Guardant Health 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 Healthcare Facilities industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Guardant Health can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Guardant Health has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Healthcare Facilities sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Guardant Health to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Guardant Health to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Guardant Health can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Loyalty marketing
– Guardant Health 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.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Guardant Health can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Guardant Health operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Healthcare Facilities sector.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Healthcare Facilities industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Guardant Health 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. Guardant Health 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.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Guardant Health to increase its market reach. Guardant Health 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.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Guardant Health is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Guardant Health can utilize new technology in the field of Healthcare Facilities industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Guardant Health 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.
Buying journey improvements
– Guardant Health can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Healthcare Facilities 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.
Threats Guardant Health External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Guardant Health are -
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.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Guardant Health 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 Healthcare Facilities industry and other sectors.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Healthcare Facilities industry are lowering. It can presents Guardant Health with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Healthcare Facilities sector.
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.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Guardant Health may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Healthcare Facilities sector.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Guardant Health in Healthcare Facilities industry. The Healthcare Facilities 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.
Regulatory challenges
– Guardant Health 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 Healthcare Facilities industry regulations.
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. Guardant Health 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.
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 Guardant Health.
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 Guardant Health in the Healthcare Facilities sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Guardant Health 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.
Environmental challenges
– Guardant Health 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. Guardant Health can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Healthcare Facilities 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 Guardant Health business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Guardant Health Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health 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 Guardant Health needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.