Analysis Of Walgreen's Strategy As Work-In-Progress: Keep Looking Ahead

Walgreens’ principal activity is to operate a chain of retail drugstores that sells prescription and nonprescription drugs. The company also carries additional product lines like general merchandise including cosmetics, food, beverages and photofinishing. Walgreens is one of the fastest growing retailers in the United States and led the chain drugstore industry in retail sales and profits last year.

Knowing the importance of a strategic vision, every company undertakes a complete analysis periodically. In order to create a strategic plan the parties involved must know every aspect of the industry and the company at hand. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the retail drugstore industry and then focus on Walgreens, the industry leader in terms of sales. As part of the in-depth analysis of Walgreens, its major competitors will also be described and analyzed. The retail drugstore industry consists of all those stores that contain a pharmacy and sell prescription drugs. It also includes businesses that sell prescription drugs online and through the mail. Most retail drugstores also offer other

In 2016, CFO Wade Miquelon told Wall Street that Walgreens would generate $8.5 billion in fiscal 2016. Not even three months later, the CFO changed this estimate to only $1.1 billion a small fraction of the original estimate. The CFO ended up taking the fall even though there were others involved obviously. These are just some ideas on the best practices in financial planning and forecasting to help avoid problems like Walgreens had.

On February 8th, 2017, I responded to Walgreen's Store #10153; located at 110 North Westwood Boulevard Poplar Bluff, Missouri, after discovering one of the fraudulent transactions had occurred at the business on February 2nd, 2017, at 1828 hours. Contact was made with a manager who agreed to review the video footage. I accompanied the manager as the store's video surveillance footage of the registers was reviewed for the aforementioned time and date. After providing the manager with the tranaction information he was able to locate the tranaction history in the store's database which provided the date, time, location, merchandise purchased and method of payment for the transaction.

This preliminary strategic assessment of Walgreens will describe the company’s current corporate strategy and business model. Walgreens’ acquisitions and mergers will be examined as well as the company’s globalization and competitive frame. A brief overview of how the company is performing and its cost-based business strategy will also be examined. This is the first of four reports that make up the strategic assessment for Walgreens.

Strategy formulation has been acknowledged as one of the most crucial factors of ensuring the long-term growth of the business. However, the manner in which strategy is formulated, and most importantly, the nature of the strategy chosen for the company determines its future position in the marketplace (Grant, 2005).

Businesses have fought between one another to become the leader in their industry. Sometimes though, their approach to becoming the leader comes with questions surfacing about whether the decision-making is ethical or not. Ethically speaking, the business conducted between companies and customers varies. Companies, such as CVS, attempt outduel other industry competitors through ethically sound practices to satisfy consumer interests. Unfortunately, these practices have become more common and CVS realized for the betterment of the company’s success, they had to redirect their competitive advantage to continue to be dominant in the consumer health industry.

"Passives" (7 or 8 rating) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition. And "Detractors" (any rating < 7) are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship” (Bain & Company, n.d.). Improving customer satisfaction is one of the main reasons why the Perfect Financial Review skill-building program exists. The NPS is an important metric because it allows management to measure the effectiveness of the Perfect Financial Review through the voice of the customer. A continuously low NPS can be detrimental to the future success of the company, so it is important that management uses this metric to monitor the company’s relationship with its customers to ensure the Perfect Financial Review is offer the training Account Managers need to create a superior client experience. To illustrate the significance of this metric using fictitious data, Figure 2 shows the effect the Perfect Financial Review has over

The first step to analyse strategy is to perform a SWOT analysis. As Daft and Marcic (2011) believe “Formulating strategy often begins with an assessment of the internal and external factors that will affect the organisation’s competitive situation.” (Daft and Marcic, 2011, p.155). So this is where I will begin the analysis.

The Balanced Scorecard (BS), created by Kaplan and Norton (2001), is an ideal tool that will be used by Levi Strauss for describing its corporate strategy in uncomplicated terms so that the vision and mission are easily communicated to and understood by all its employees. It assists in identifying the critical organisational success factors (CSFs) and associated key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the degree to which its organisational benefits are achieved.

Evaluation of strategy is a meticulous process as the success of a business is somewhat hinged on it. To properly evaluate a strategy, the components of the strategy must be recognized and calculated. For the purpose of this paper, and as recommended by the course curriculum, “Balance Scorecard” method will be used to evaluate Werner’s strategy (Norton & Kaplan, 1992).

Strategic marketing plays a significant role in today’s competitive environment. Strategic marketing can help to distinguish the company from its competitors. Proper planning and implementation of strategy can provide advantage over other companies. According to Johnson & Whittington (2008), strategy is a long term planning of the company, think of the near of distant future where the company wants to be and what it wants to achieve. Its direction and scope helps exploit companies’ available resources in the best possible manner helping it to achieve advantage over others and fulfil stakeholders’ expectation. According to Henderson (sited at Marketing news 1982) strategy works as a “system” which looks after internal activities

The first step of the strategic-planning process is the vision statement, which is a broad statement about the company’s value, purposes, and future direction. The mission statement conveys eight key components about the firm, including target customers and markets, products and services, geographic domain, etc. The article states, “The finance component is represented by the company’s commitment to survival, growth, and profitability” (Kono & Barnes). The long-term financial goals represent the firm’s commitment to a strategy. The analysis is the third step and comprises of the firm’s business trends, external opportunities, internal resources, and core competencies. Porter’s five forces model, industry evolution model, value-chain analysis, and a SWOT analysis can be used within the analysis step. The next step is strategy formulation, which can be done using Porter’s generic strategies model to help the firm aim for one of the competitive advantages. Lastly, is the strategic implementation and management step, where the balanced scorecard (BSC) has become the most effective management instruments used to implement and monitor strategy execution and align the strategy with expected performance. The BSC stresses the importance of establishing financial goals for a firms employees, functional areas, and business units by translating the strategy into objectives, operational actions, and financial goals by focusing on financial factors,

The term ‘strategy’ is widely used in the business environment. A strategy is used to decide and achieve business objectives. The rapport between a firm’s strategy and its overall performance is the key focus in strategic management. Kay (2000) believes that nowadays it is impossible to plan and predict the future, he argues that strategy has become the influencing of a firms market positioning. A myriad of models to analyse strategic choices have been described by scholars (Hambrick & Fredrickson, 1996).In the early 1980s, Michael Porter’s presented his model of generic strategies. Since then, it has been one of the most used methods due to its high efficiency (Obasi, et al., 2006) and thus it is seen as the dominant paradigm of strategic implementation (Hendry, 1990).

Once goals and strategies are established, implementation as well as the performance of the strategies themes can then be measured with a set of balance scorecards. The scorecards serve a number of important functions. First, the key performance indicators provide a means to quantify and