Question

describe the strategic management process you would follow with your staff for your business using strategic management mode. l illustrating the financial and non-financial benefits in following a strategic management process. use examples to support your points.

Answer 1

Strategic management :-

Strategic management is the management of an organization’s resources to achieve its goals and objectives. Strategic management involves setting objectives, analyzing the competitive environment, analyzing the internal organization, evaluating strategies and ensuring that management rolls out the strategies across the organization. At its heart, strategic management involves identifying how the organization stacks up compared to its competitors and recognizing opportunities and threats facing an organization, whether they come from within the organization or from competitors.

Uses of strategic management :-

There are many benefits of strategic management and they include identification, prioritization, and exploration of opportunities. For instance, newer products, newer markets, and newer forays into business lines are only possible if firms indulge in strategic planning. Next, strategic management allows firms to take an objective view of the activities being done by it and do a cost benefit analysis as to whether the firm is profitable.

Just to differentiate, by this, we do not mean the financial benefits alone but also the assessment of profitability that has to do with evaluating whether the business is strategically aligned to its goals and priorities.

The key point to be noted here is that strategic management allows a firm to orient itself to its market and consumers and ensure that it is actualizing the right strategy.

Strategic Management process in a hotel :-

We adopted two key strategies in improving the performance of the hotel. They are :-

• Improve/Re-positioning the brand
• Achieving operational excellence,

To have an edge over our competitors, we felt that we need to focus on the above strategies. The drivers of growth depends on performance of the hotel and hence we need to focus on operational excellence.

Brand repositioning was done by redoing our brand. The logo of the hotel was changed and was made more modern and vibrant colour combination. As we had an amusement park attached to the hotel, the logo was required to be vibrant and modern which appealed to the youth. The message through our mascot - Cheeku was instrumental to connect to kids. The schools and colleges were targeted by the business development team and the mascot was a part of the sales visit to the schools. The popularity grew and so did the walk-ins to the amusement park and hotel.

Achieving operational Excellence :- To achieve operational excellence, we had to first have the employees of the hotel aligned to the goals and objectives of the company. Hence the need of operational excellence was briefed to the employees and the road map was explained in different batches

To start with, the goals and objective of each employee was set at the beginning of the year. Each employee had a financial goal and also an operational goal. Each of these goals had objectives which were measurable and achievable. These objectives had initiatives mentioned. The appraisal system was aligned to the achievement of the initiatives. The appraisal report would be negative if the initiatives were not achieved by the employee. Hence all employees were inclined to achieve their set objectives which were linked to their annual increment/promotions.

Another strategic initiative was implementation of trainings and adherence to SOP (Standard Operating Instructions). A training calendar was finalised at the beginning of the year after a training need analysis. Each and every training was carried out by a specialist team of trainers. The SOPs also were revamped to suit the goals and objectives of the hotel.