The world's easiest "management strategy" planning course Chapter 3

Survey analysis is the first preparation that must be made when taking steps toward the direction and goals set by management. There are four types of survey analysis: “preliminary survey”, “external environment analysis”, “internal environment analysis”, and “integrated analysis”. If any of these are in excess or deficiency, the balance of research and analysis will be lost.

When our company supports a company, we first conduct hearings and preliminary surveys on products and services, and then investigate the external and internal environment surrounding the company’s products and services. By analyzing the survey results summarized here in more detail, we can identify the current situation and issues of the company, review the strategy for improvement, and come up with guidelines for strategic design.

Specifically, the following method is used.

This is a survey to understand the current state of the company, such as conducting hearings from the president and the person in charge of the company to obtain information and conducting a self-diagnosis.

There are two types of preliminary surveys. That is “preliminary hearing” and “self-diagnosis”. In the “preliminary hearing,” external consultants and strategists are appointed to meet directly with management, executives, and personnel in charge to conduct thorough hearings on products and businesses in every detail. By having a third party look at it objectively, we can expect to discover new resources as well as issues and problems that we have not noticed until now.

The other is “self-diagnosis”, in which the person himself / herself checks without an external consultant or strategist. In that case, the president, executives, and management will each perform a “self-diagnosis” based on multiple confirmation items. Originally, the management should have the best understanding of the business environment of the company, so we ask them to look back on this. There were many cases where I realized the resources of my company again by conducting a self-diagnosis. “Corporate Diagnosis Navi” that allows you to easily perform “self-diagnosis” is available at the following site. Please give it a try.

Online Management Diagnosis | Strategic Partners

First and foremost, it is important to analyze your company. Knowing yourself will be important data for making an accurate diagnosis in future management strategy formulation.

● Preliminary hearing: Conduct hearings from the president and product / business personnel to obtain information on issues.

● Self-diagnosis: Have the president and management make a diagnosis to understand the overall corporate strength of the company.

As the name implies, external environmental analysis is to understand the external situation surrounding a company. For example, we collect information from various perspectives such as “opportunity,” “threat,” “competition,” and “industry situation,” and objectively determine the situation of the company.

Companies that are constantly exposed to competitive pressures and changes in the environment are simply weeded out by simply running them. Companies must constantly respond to change. The changes in the business environment are extremely complex and rapid, so it is important to adapt quickly to changes in the situation and change yourself.

There are limits to the analysis, but if any issues become clear, it will be an opportunity to improve corporate operations. You can’t make a strategic plan without seeing how the environment surrounding your company will change.

Achieving sound survival and prosperity requires a strategic plan that presupposes external environmental analysis.
There are several types of external environment analysis, but here they are roughly classified into two types.

One of them is “macro environment analysis”. As the name implies, this is a broad perspective of your company’s business environment.

No matter how good a business owner is, it is often the case that the lack of analysis and understanding of this macro environment puts the company in a tight spot. For example, you could have foreseen that legal regulations would come into force, but inadvertently overlooked them, and before you realized that your products were later regulated or that consumer needs changed suddenly, your services May get bored.

When I was in business, I tended to give priority to business gradually, and I became ignorant of changes in the surroundings, and I saw many managers who just became “looking at the trees and not looking at the forest.” That is why it is necessary to have a broad perspective and look over the business environment of the company.

There are several types of frameworks (* Note) for performing this macro-environment analysis, but the representative one is the framework called “PEST analysis” devised by Professor Philip Kotler, a prominent American economist. is. PEST is an attempt to analyze the business environment from the four perspectives of Politics, Economy, Society, and Technology. Another external environmental analysis is “micro-environment analysis.” “is. After looking at the external environment from a macro perspective, it’s time to narrow the focus. It is an analysis of “seeing the forest” after “seeing the forest”.

Famous for micro-environmental analysis is Professor Michael E. Porter’s “Five Forces Analysis,” which is said to be the youngest professor at Harvard Business School. The macro analysis mentioned above indirectly affects the business environment of the company, but the 5 force analysis sorts out the power relationships of competitors that directly affect the management microscope of the company. is.

For example, if deregulation is applied to areas where barriers to new entrants have been high and any company can enter the market, the threat of “new entrants” will arise. Especially if you are in a different industry, it is difficult to predict what kind of hand you will use, which can have a big impact on your company. Any industry that anyone can enter is always in a fiercely competitive environment.

“Seller (supplier) bargaining power” refers to the power relationship between the purchaser and the company when there is any purchase. If the products and services we purchase are rare products and services, the products and services will be in competition. In that case, the purchaser will have an advantage, and the purchase price may rise or the purchase itself may not be possible. As a result, your company’s profits may decrease, or you may not be able to provide products and services.

“Buyer (customer) bargaining power” is the relationship with the customer. If you make delicious bread like no other, there will be a line and customers will try to buy it even if you wait for an hour, and if it is ordinary bread, no one will enter the store even if you call in in front of the store. Maybe. If your product or service has a rarity value to your customers, your advantage will increase, but if your customers don’t feel the need, your customers will have an advantage.

It is necessary to understand the “threat of alternative products and services” as a substitute for the company’s products and services. For example, let’s say you’ve developed a groundbreaking diet supplement, but a boom has occurred and your company has grown rapidly. Since then, the company has maintained a high market share of diet supplements without losing to competitors’ products, but for some reason sales have begun to drop sharply. What could be the cause?

People who want to lose weight do not want diet supplements, but the purpose is to lose weight. Any means can be used as long as you can “thin”. In this case, you may have created a groundbreaking fitness gym that claims to lose weight, or you may have gone for a run because of the running boom and fewer people relying on supplements. The cause is something unexpected, and it is an example that our competitors are not necessarily competitors who offer similar products and services.

The last is “competition within the industry”. Many business owners are easily overlooked by the trends of their competitors and very often overlook the analysis of the other four forces while looking at their rivals.

In this way, it is very important to review your company’s business environment from five perspectives. If you write it down, you can discover that the environment surrounding your company’s products and services was actually very harsh, or you can find a weakness in some force and immediately think of countermeasures.

Analysis may seem difficult, but it’s okay to write it down first, so it’s a good idea to write it down once.

After analyzing the external environment, it is time to analyze the internal resources.

It is a method of re-questioning and evaluating everything from the strengths and weaknesses of your company, the educational status and abilities of employees, the abilities and backgrounds of managers and executives, from a third-party standpoint. This part is also often overlooked, so management should be careful.

In the internal resource analysis, we evaluate whether it is “excellent” or “inferior” in terms of system, human resources, technology, management ability, finance, network, production capacity, location, etc. within the company. I will continue.
A company’s “strength” is a factor that gives it an edge over its competitors, that is, a factor that outperforms its competitors. In recent years, “brand strategy” has been emphasized, but the brand is one of the factors that have a great influence as an “internal environmental factor”.

If there are “strengths”, there are also “weaknesses” that are the opposite. Technically it is called the “inferiority factor”, but you need to be clearly aware of the “weaknesses”. If there are “weaknesses” such as “weak technical capabilities”, “difficulty in developing human resources”, and “poor location” in formulating management strategies, and if they hinder management, we will take measures to overcome them. You have to think of a plan.

By properly grasping “strengths / weaknesses”, it becomes possible to think about “how to fight”. It is important to know that internal environmental analysis has these important implications.

Let’s introduce a typical framework for internal resource analysis. It is also called “internal resource analysis” in “VRIO analysis” advocated by Professor Jay B. Barney.

This is a type of evaluation method that analyzes from four perspectives: economic value (Value), rarity (Rarity), modelability (Inimitability), and organization (Organization). However, since the emphasis is on internal analysis, this alone will cause a shortage in the analysis results.

The well-known marketing analysis framework has advantages and disadvantages, and there are some biases and size differences, so I think it is difficult to comprehensively evaluate and analyze Japanese SMEs.

By the way, for various analyzes, we have introduced only typical frameworks. There are many types of research analysis frameworks. You can also look it up online, so if you’re interested, or if you need it, check it out.

Reference examples of other frameworks

“Positioning analysis”

“Strategic positioning” is the position of each company in the industry. “Strategic positioning analysis” that confirms the position of the company is a very important method in company analysis and strategy planning.

In general, a typical approach to strategic positioning is to create and analyze a two-axis matrix (positioning map).

“Value chain analysis”
The “value chain” is a concept that regards corporate activities from the procurement of raw materials to the delivery of products and services to customers as a series of value chains. It is translated as “value chain”, but in simple terms, it represents the chain of business activities until profits are generated.

Value chain analysis clarifies costs, strengths, and weaknesses for each activity (business within a company) of this value chain.

“Service Profit Chain”
The service profit chain is a framework that shows the causal relationships such as employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and corporate profit that are born from sales and profits.

As employee satisfaction (ES) increases, so does the level of service we provide. Higher service levels also increase customer satisfaction (CS), and higher customer satisfaction increases customer loyalty. As a result, the idea is that it will be possible to increase sales and earn profits.

A business strategy cannot be formulated without considering the environment in which the company is located. Therefore, we will perform an integrated analysis. This is an analysis that combines the elements derived from the external environment analysis and the internal environment analysis.

We will integrate all the information from the preliminary survey, external environment analysis, and internal environment analysis that we have obtained so far to get a firm grasp of the overall picture. If any missing information is found here, it is the task of collecting further information to fill in the shortfall and finding the core part of the overall management strategy. In other words, the analysis of the external environment and the analysis of internal resources up to now have been a collection of materials for formulating strategies in the future.

What was your company’s macro / micro environment like?
What were your strengths and weaknesses?
Please look back.

By integrating these, you can gradually see what you should do, that is, your management strategy.
I think this process is similar to cooking. It is a process of thinking about what kind of food can be made from the information materials and internal resource materials of the macro / micro environment.

A well-known framework for this integrated analysis is SWOT analysis.

SWOT analysis is a framework for clarifying the environment in which your company is located and deriving strategies and strategic issues from it, and is a highly evaluated analysis method as a tool for “strategic thinking.”

“Strength” “Weakness” “Opportunity” “Threat” is a method to analyze the company from the four perspectives and formulate a management strategy, “strength” and ” “Weaknesses” are inserted from the internal environment analysis obtained in the previous stage, and “opportunities” and “threats” are integrated analysis by inserting the information obtained from the external environment analysis. In this way, “strengths” and “opportunities” are positive factors, and “weaknesses” and “threats” are negative factors, so there is an advantage that it is easy to list the strengths and weaknesses.

However, SWOT analysis has been used extensively and is now becoming a common analysis method, and depending on the individuality of each company, it may not be suitable. Actual strategists do not use SWOT analysis, but use their own integrated analysis framework, but we recommend that you try this SWOT first. Through environmental analysis and internal resource analysis, such information can be smoothly put into SWOT, and even just organizing it can be expected to have a great effect.