Question

McDonald (1993) contends that if there is only one word to describe the business environment, it is “change”. In this line, organizations are continuously under great pressure to develop and implement business-oriented methods and measures to improve the overall effectiveness of business organization in order to achieve a competitive advantage (Al Faha, Al Mahmud, Miah & Islam, 2015). The preamble above highlights the need for an organization to continually appraise and reappraise its business environment. Required: Identify a company in Ghana of your interest, and conduct a SWOT analysis on the company's business environment, to reflect how the organization can strategize to achieve a competitive advantage

Answer 1

DHL Ghana analysis

DHL Ghana is taken into consideration to identify how DHL adopts changes and implements strategies to achieve competitive advantage.

Strengths

DHL SWOT analysis reveals the company has strengths such as strong and large network in Ghana, innovative abilities to cope up with change, brand equity, and strong financial position. Company invests in employees for their skills development, and establishes a well developed IT infrastructure. Diversity is also applied by DHL to motivate workers and to send a positive impression on the community.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses of company reveals company not advertising aggressively to beat competitors, dependency on private agencies to provide logistics service, and limited growth due to intense competition. Weaknesses of not practicing good waste management practices, not understanding needs of customers, ineffective decision making by DHL Company, poor customer service and negative viral marketing, delayed decision making reveal that DHL has to develop its strategic ability to reduce these weaknesses.

Opportunities

Opportunities reveal DHL needs to make customers focused supply chain and enhance its reach to potential customers.

Threats

Threats are increased competition, slowdown in economy, and threats from local courier services.

Analysis of DHL Company reveals that strategic initiatives by it are not appropriate. It does not consider advertising its achievements and improving its brand image. This weakens its initiatives taken for customer service improvement. Skills development of employees and diversity promotion need to be communicated to enhance brand image as well as beat competitors. There spending more budgets on advertising and promotional activities to respond to negative viral marketing, and improve brand image is suggested.

External environmental challenge comes from regulatory environment, economic slowdown, changing preferences of customers due to reputation risks a company faces, etc. for example, inability to manage waste by DHL creates a reputation risk as it reveals that the company is not responsible to environmental issues mitigation. Therefore, strategic initiatives to enhance waste management and environmental protection must be practiced by DHL Company. Environmental and sustainable initiatives must be implemented by DHL Company. Strategies to deal with poor customer service and improving decision making of employees also require that structure and leadership approach of the company need to be altered to manage external changes influence. Implementing strong interventions to address these weaknesses can help DHL company to exploit the market opportunities as well.

These strategic initiatives can help DHL company to achieve competitive advantages.