STUDENTS' CORNER - 133

We learned that effective coordination among Finance, Strategy and Operations is a must in supply chain management and we also studied the basic facts about Finance. Now we will move on to Strategy.

Strategy, one of the most popular words with the business managers, means simply the way you choose or evolve to achieve your goal. Of course, you may have both short-term and long-term goals and you need strategies to achieve them. Strategy is involved in running the organization itself most efficiently, strategy to deal with the employees, strategy to deal with the managers themselves, and strategy to deal with the inevitable customers, so on.  From the individuals to the institutions, strategy binds and drives all towards the goal.

Deciding upon or planning strategy requires only facts to be taken into account. For example, if you have to frame a strategy to market your product, too many facts form the basis such as, to mention a few of the essentials, the distribution of the market share for the product you want to introduce, the hierarchical list of companies now dominating the market, the market share you aim to achieve, the target of the product, the choice of a region for test marketing, so on.  You cannot afford to neglect the positions of your rivals in the market and more importantly, the consumer behavior with regard to the product and the efficacy of your supply chain and of distribution channels. 

In fact the scope of a strategy, in a way, is the very scope of the business, the present, the future and also the past. The strategy moves towards an uncertain future armed with the knowledge of the history of the development of the product in the market and of the almost complete knowledge of the present challenges you are likely to face.  In other words, as much as possible a sort of mastery of the business environment informs the strategy so that your path of action will take you towards your goal.

To put it in a simpler language, from where you are, from what is, the strategy leads, is expected to lead to where you want to be, what should be. Even to have an exact grasp of what is  itself constitutes a great challenge that demands from you correct information for relevant things and at times certain gut feelings to take decisions.

We will look into Operations in our next session.