60 words response each to student 1 and 2 as it pertains to original question
ORIGINAL QUESTION:
Discussion Topic: VCA, RBV, and SWOT Analyses
Discuss how you can use VCA, RBV, and SWOT analyses to gain a stronger sense of what might be a firm’s key building blocks are for a successful strategy.
Choose a Fortune 1000 company to demonstrate these aforementioned analyses.
STUDENT NUMBER 1 RESPONSE:
Professor and class,
Value Chain Analysis (VCA), is what company’s use to find out how they can add more value to their customers. The activity to carry this out is broken into 2 categories; Support and Primary. Primary is the behind the scenes, such as, operations, sales and marketing. The support category is the people and tools to get the job done. Resource Based View (RBV) analysis, is when a company looks at its resources as the key to their performance. Resources in a company include employees (knowledge and expertise), capabilities and intangibles (J. Pearce & R. Robinson, Strategic Management, 13th edition, chapter 6). SWOT analysis is the way company’s can see the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within the organization including employees, operations and competition.
Take Lowe’s as a fortune 1000 company. To add value to the customer they need to look at services provided. Delivery, credit programs, project specialists for both interior and exterior applications and web based ordering, product Q&A and how to guides. To look at the resource base, it is the employees and their skills. For many employees Lowe’s is just a basic retail job but there are many in each store that are experts in the field. You may find certified electricians and plumbers, people who have been in the construction industry for decades, painters, landscapers and so on. Having this level of expertise in the store helps set the bar for service and success in the company. SWOT, of course, looks at the strengths and weaknesses at Lowe’s, but more importantly their opportunities and threats. These two categories really reflect on competitive advantage, their responsibility in the community and towards the staff and how the operations process is working for the goals that are set out.
Reference:
J. Pearce & R. Robinson, Strategic Management, 13th edition, chapter 6, page 149 – 165
STUDENT NUMBER 2 RESPONSE:
Prof and class,
VCA is how a business attempts to analyze how a business can create customer values. This is done by examining using different activities that is in the business. RBV is the method of determining the company’s strategic advantages and examining the company’s skills, assets, capabilities, and intangibles. SWOT or Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats. It identifies the company’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats the company may face. It is used to determine the company’s strategic situations (Pearson & Robinson, 2013).
Walmart, a fortune 1000 company, can use these analysis to help them learn about their customer’s values and be able to accommodate those values. They are able to determine what the strengths are within the company and using their strategic advantages like; skills, assets, capabilities and intangibles to accomplish their goals. And the use of SWOT analysis is important to the company in that management is able to see what those strengths are as well as point out the areas the company may be week in. It helps to determine what future opportunities the company may have and also alert of the threats that may need to be tackled while trying to gain some of these opportunities.
Reference
Pearce, J. A., & Robinson, R. B. (2013). Strategic management: Planning for domestic & global competition (13th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Smithson, Nathanial. (August 15, 2015) Walmart SWOT Analysis & Recommendations: Business Management. Panmore Institute. Retrieved from http://panmore.com/walmart-swot-analysis-recommendations-case-study
