Environmental Factors

One department at Coca Cola is the marketing department. They use the following piece of information such as Web-Based communication. They use Web–Based communication to maintain a secure and effective way of communicating within the corporation. A strategic decision that the IT department has made at Coca Cola headquarters is to upgrade its current communications platforms. (Coca-Cola Enterprises Embraces Microsoft Software-plus-Services to Unify Its Workforce, 2008)

When manipulating a business’s strategy, it is important to focus on the external factors in the environment. An external analysis is where a business conducts environmental scanning that present a company with the key external forces influencing the organization. The facets of external forces examined are the business environment, remote environment, or the competitive environment. A business environment is all of the external factors in the general environment that a firm cannot control, but can affect their strategy. The remote environment is the forces that affect most firms. Lastly, a competitive environment is the firm’s specific industry and its entirety. The external analysis is pertinent to a company called Dick’s Drive- In; without it, Dick’s would not be a thriving popular business today.

An organization’s external environment is terribly important and must be studied and understood for the organization to truly succeed. Through such study and understanding, a manager would be able “mitigate threats and leverage opportunities” that are caused by the six segments identified as macro-level external forces: (1) political, (2) economic, (3) sociocultural, (4) technological, (5) ecological, and (6) legal (Rothaermel, 2013, pp. 56-57). Since the manager’s decisions, or firm effects, have a greater impact than those external forces mentioned only when the manager accounts for them and builds a strategy around them, the manager must be aware of and understand these forces to be

Analyze the external and internal environment for opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses that impact the firm’s competitiveness.

Modern American society beliefs have influenced my identity, values, and beliefs. The American society believes highly in technology, which influences my beliefs, and has me relying on technology for many things. However the american society also shapes my beliefs in a different way, if there is something that America, as a society believes in, then I may find myself believing the opposite, simply because I didn't want my opinion to be made by society. My values are most definitely influenced by society, I often fall for society's attempts to tell me that i need more ‘stuff’, and that puts material items in my values. America, as a whole is less family centered, so I often find myself valuing my friends over my family. Lastly, my identity,

The attitude, values, ideals and beliefs of individuals are greatly influenced by the culture in which they live. Precisely, culture is the sum total of the ways of life of people in a particular society.

Values are separated into three different types: universal values, cultural values, and personal values. Universal values being that humans universally value good manners. Personal Values provide an inner suggestion for what is good, important, beautiful, beneficial, useful and so on. It also influences behaviour and helps solve common difficulties and problems for human survival. Members of a culture will share similar values, which are transmitted by family, media, education, and religion.

Identifying influencing factors of a company’s macro-environment helps in the strategic development and management within a company. The macro-environment outlines an industry and the competitive environment as seen in figure 3.1, (Gamble, Peteraf, Thompson, 39). Within the macro-environment there are the political factors, economic conditions, sociocultural forces, technological factors, environment forces, and legal/regulatory factors. All of these factors blanket the habitat an industry and its competition thrive in. Inside the industry and competitive environment there are five factors that influence an individual company. The five factors are suppliers, rival firms, new entrants, buyers, and substitute products. The biggest impact on a company are these five factors. For example, Under Armour focuses on their industry and competitive environment to survive and grow. Their strategy to win over the market share from Nike and Adidas consists of expanding a stable and original brand within record time, taking an innovative approach to their product line-up and brand-name appeal where the market seemed to be barren, and lastly, the company enters in the foreign market early on to establish its brand and influence markets outside of the US.

A method to solve the problems about how to distribute the revenues and workload between WCS and local offices is to turn them into profit centers. The WCS will manage the direct account contacts and coordinate global brands and campaigns. The local offices are then subcontracted for local adaptation and implementation. This separation will also clarify the reporting relationships between the management-oriented WCS and the creativity-focused local offices. To remedy the communication problem, facilitate a thorough knowledge and information exchange and ensure consistency as necessary for global Brand Stewardship, the company's ERP system must be refocused on Customer Relationship Management aspects. The data extracted from Beers' client interviews will prove helpful in identifying these aspects. Company-wide accesses to this CRM system will empower front-line employees to fulfil the quality service promise given to the clients and will furthermore create a sense of network and community in the company. In addition, it will reduce transaction cost and boost efficiency, thus enabling O&M to maximize the profitability of voluminous

External environment is quite important for the any company, because it creates the conditions that the organization need to run the business in. In order to develop company strategy successfully, the external environment need to be analyzed properly. One of the best techniques to do that is Five Porter’s Forces analysis.

The internal environment analysis focuses on current marketing strategy and performance, present and anticipated organizational resources, current and projected cultural and structural issues, and the customer environment. On the other hand, the external environment addressed competition, economic growth and stability, political trends, Legal and Regulatory Issues, technological advancements, sociocultural trends, and the SWOT analysis.

An analysis of the external environment includes the factors in a business’s external environment about a business's industry, competition, and political and social environments, and affects the firm’s strategy (Aaker, 2001).

Many factors shape and form the operations strategy of a corporation, for example, the ever increasing need for globalizing products and operations and thus reducing the unit cost, creating a technology leadership position, introducing new inventions, taking advantage of mass customization, using supplier partnering, and looking for strategic sourcing solutions. All of these factors require an external or market-based orientation; these are the changes that take place in the external environment of the company.

This analysis consists of analyzing the external environment of the company (competitors, social, technological, regulations, etc.). The purpose is to identify the key opportunities and threats in the environment.

It also aims to identify market place opportunities and threats in the external environment and to decide how to use their resources, capabilities and core competencies in the firm’s internal environment to pursue opportunities and overcome threats.