Thursday, April 24, 2014

Busness Strategic Analysis Tools


ACCA P5 Advance Performance Management



ACCA Article: SWOT (TOWS) Analysis
SWOT is one of widely used strategic analysis tools. SWOT represents Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats an organisation faces. Strengths and weakness relates to internal environment of an organisation whereas opportunities and threats are concerned with impact on organisation from external environment. SWOT starts with self-analysis (i.e. identification of internal and external issues that have positive and negative effect in performance of organisation. Strength and weakness evaluates financial, managerial, marketing, production related and other internal aspects of business. Opportunities and threats evaluate boarder business environment (PESTEL), government policies and regulations and other external aspects of industry the business is in. The resulting action from the analysis should focus on addressing weakness, protecting against threat, exploiting opportunities and matching strength with opportunities.

Boston Consulting Group Matrix: BCG Matrix is a simple 2by2 matrix where columns represent market share of business and rows represent the growth prospect of business activities. BCG illustrates that a viable and sustainable business should have mixture of more than one business lines representing cow, star and child. Here, growth is measure of market attractiveness and market share is indicator of competitive attractiveness. On cash flow basis cow is regarded as cash generator whereas the child is supposed to be cash user. The star and the dog are cash neutral. Therefore, the right mix of cash generating, star and child means the business is viable for long run. The problem however is about the uncertainty of lifespan of these activities and viewing the activities under only two constraints. Further, it focus that all dogs should be condemned. There is also practical difficulty in determining as high and low growth. It also assumes that every activities are independent which may not always the case (e.g. joint product and by products).



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