Strategic Alliances:
Strategic alliances are partnerships formed between firms for purposes of cooperation for mutual benefit. Firms may combine managerial, financial, and technological resources in addition to their competitive advantages. Strategic alliances may take various forms such as sharing of production facilities, co-funding research, and using each other’s distribution networks for marketing and distribution. Other benefits accrued from strategic alliances include broadening of business and political contact bases, enhancing of firms global image, and developing new products at a profit. Strategic alliances have certain trade-offs to consider such as less equity at stake, inefficient communication, unbalanced resource allocation, and loss of control over important issues such as operating costs, employees and product quality.
Organic vs. Mechanistic Organization structures:
Organizations need different structures for them to control activities in ways that allow them to react and adapt to uncertainties, and environment changes. Companies operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment may adopt an organic structure that allows them to process and distribute knowledge and information faster within the organization. This increases their ability to respond to environment changes. Mechanistic structures are effective and efficient in organizations that operate in a more certain and stable environment. This is because companies in such environments do not usually make quick decisions. Again this structure allows formalization and centralization of day to day operating procedures and decisions since there is no inherent need for constant innovation or change.
Organizing for customer needs:
The main aim of structuring responsive and agile organizations is to enable them meet and exceed customer needs and expectations. This is because customer centric organization has a more profound impact on organizing than any other environment aspect. Organizations may build customer relationships and organize for their needs by creating business value chains, establishing top quality management with the aim of customer satisfaction, implementing of ISO 9000 standards ideally formulated to ensure consumer satisfaction, business process re-engineering, and technology implementation in service delivery.
Ways companies organize around technology and speed:
In a broad sense, technology refers to processes, methods, skills, and systems used to transform resources (raw input) into complete products (output). Technological advancements have helped improve the effectiveness and efficiency of production, management and other business processes. However, time efficiency has emerged as a key competitive advantage that firms require to stand out. In this case, time based competition refers to strategies that aim at increasing the speed of product or service delivery. Logistics deals with moving goods to the right place, in the right amount and at the right time. Just in Time (JIT) system calls for component sub-assembling and manufacturing in small batches, then delivering them to the next production stage. Simultaneous engineering is a design approach where all relevant functions jointly and continuously cooperate in an effort to maximize product quality and meet consumer needs.
