Napco's External Environment

Analyze the external and internal environment for opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses that impact the firm’s competitiveness.

The business environment of an organization reveals much about its competitiveness and the possible influences on the success of its strategies. The focus of this paper will be an environmental scan of the internal and external environments of two real-world firms, their competitive advantages and company strategies for creating value and sustaining competitiveness, measurement guidelines for verifying strategic effectiveness and their evaluation.

The importance of the analysis determines what outer factors that mold or influence management’s future strategic decisions. Accordingly, the general environment analysis incorporates several divisions, such as the economic circumstances, political/legal effects, socio-cultural powers, technological dynamics, and physical conditions (Gamble, Thompson, Peteraf, 2015). Most importantly, each segment will be centered on what significant areas that are correlated to the bed and mattress

The competitive environment of a business is the part of a company's external environment that consists of other firms trying to win customers in the same market. It is the segment of the industry that includes all immediate rivals. These are factors that are out of the company’s control, such as when state regulations change and they have to adjust to meet those requirements. To ensure Macy’s Inc. understands the environment they will conduct an external environmental analysis. This would include identifying any opportunities and threats to the firm (Hitt, Ireland, Hoskisson, 2013). One of the opportunities that Macy’s could

In this question we saw how to use industry and competitive analysis to assess the attractiveness of a company 's external environment. In this chapter, we discuss how to evaluate a particular company 's strategic situation in that environment. Company situation analysis centres on five questions:

“Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress” – Herbert Hoover. The environments that today’s firms operate in are not static. The competitive environment they are operating in is constantly changing due to the entry or exit of competitors, changing technology and the demands of consumers. In order to maintain their market share and profitability, firms must continually assess and evaluate their competitive environment. Evaluating the various market forces firms’ face, and their effect on the competitive market ensures that an organization retains a proactive stance to the competitive environment. Instead of just accepting the status quo, organizations that actively examine and analyze their environment can then make choices and develop strategies that take advantage of the competitive situation or affect it to the firm’s benefit. This proactive stance to the market allows organizations to create value and position themselves for long term success. Firms that do not remain proactive and continually scan the competitive environment run the risk of being blindsided by innovation in the environment or significant changes undertaken by the competition.

The environment is like a double-edged sword, providing companies opportunities but threats as well. Therefore, in an increasingly hostile marketplace, a systematic and careful environmental analysis is supposed to be considered by companies (Johnson et al, 2011). The macro-environment of a company can be analysed by the framework of PESTEL, which includes six categories: political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (Johnson et al, 2011, Appendix A ).

Identifying influencing factors of a company’s macro-environment helps in the strategic development and management within a company. The macro-environment outlines an industry and the competitive environment as seen in figure 3.1, (Gamble, Peteraf, Thompson, 39). Within the macro-environment there are the political factors, economic conditions, sociocultural forces, technological factors, environment forces, and legal/regulatory factors. All of these factors blanket the habitat an industry and its competition thrive in. Inside the industry and competitive environment there are five factors that influence an individual company. The five factors are suppliers, rival firms, new entrants, buyers, and substitute products. The biggest impact on a company are these five factors. For example, Under Armour focuses on their industry and competitive environment to survive and grow. Their strategy to win over the market share from Nike and Adidas consists of expanding a stable and original brand within record time, taking an innovative approach to their product line-up and brand-name appeal where the market seemed to be barren, and lastly, the company enters in the foreign market early on to establish its brand and influence markets outside of the US.

1. What forces from the natural physical environmental are currently affecting the corporation and the industries in which it competes? Which present current or future threats? Opportunities?

This analysis consists of analyzing the external environment of the company (competitors, social, technological, regulations, etc.). The purpose is to identify the key opportunities and threats in the environment.

Organisations scan environmental information and use it for planning, decision making and control. Organisations transmit information to several internal and external agencies like govt., investors, trade unions and professional bodies. For any organization, the environment consists of the set of external conditions and forces that have the potential to influence the organization. In the case of Subway, for example, the environment contains its customers, its rivals such as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, social trends such as the shift in society toward healthier eating, political entities such as the US Congress, and many additional conditions and forces. It is useful to break the concept of the environment down into two components. The general environment (or macroenvironment) includes overall trends and events in society such as social

General environment’s segment will affect not just one or two industry, but will influence all type of industry and business. While if we want to assess the condition of specific industry, we can use Industry environment analysis discovered by porter and named as “Porter’s Five Forces”. They are Threat of New Entrants, Power of Suppliers, Power of Buyers, Product Substitutes, and Intensity of Rivalry.

To assure the success of a business over a long period of time the business must be able to conduct regular analysis of their success. They must be able to determine where they are today and have a goal of where they would like to see themselves 5-10 years down the road. In order to conduct a true analysis of the company, one must complete an environmental scan of their organization. Thus scanning for events, trends, issues and expectations that they may be faced with in the future. Furthermore, examining all internal and external environment challenges. Internal environmental challenges may be with employees, shareholders or board of directors or the overall culture of the organization. External environmental

     A businesses environment creates many opportunities as well as problems for prospering businesses. The environment determines what a business can do by shaping and channeling its development. Businesses function within an environment by allowing entrepreneurs to raise capital and create profits freely. The supply of money available within a business as well as the economic stability through times of growth and recession have strong effects on businesses. Not only is the physical environment, including natural resources, pollution and energy as discussed previously, important, but many other

The General Environment consists of factors that are external to a company 's operations. This can include: global, demographic, technological, economic, political and legal, physical, and socio-cultural factors. Each of these factors can impact a business in a number of different ways. They can impact how a company chooses to market its products, decide which markets are attractive or unattractive, it 's product innovations and expenditures, and how the company will consume energy. Analyzing Google 's general environment can provide insight into how the company makes its strategic decisions as well as how these different factors affect their activities and performance.