CSA matrix: YOU ONLY NEED TO DO 1 OF THE 3 MINI-CASES. CHOOSE THE ONE THAT INTERESTS YOU THE MOST AND SKIP THE REST.
For the Assignment please refer to Case 17 on Aliexpress in your textbook.
You have been hired as a business consultant to prepare a report for the CEO of the organization. Using strategic models, you have learned, that your report should contain detailed and convincing reasons to support each one of your recommendations. It is imperative that the conclusions offered by your recommendations are analysis-based and drawn from the concepts and analytical tools discussed in the text.
The length of the section should be roughly 5 pages. Please format your paper to use Times New Roman 12pt font with double spacing and 1-inch margins. Your paper’s format should include headings, and subheadings as required for the identification of topics you are discussing. Upload your file as a PDF for the online submission.
Your case analysis must address the following questions, based on the information in the case. Do not do any research beyond the case information! Your analysis format should address the questions in sequence based on the information in the case.
Part 2: Internal Analysis:
- Assess the strength of the companies relative to each other in the industry using a Competitive Strength Assessment (CSA) Matrix from Chapter 4. What conclusions can be made concerning the ability of the companies to compete based on your CSA matrix?
- Conduct an in-depth financial analysis with regards to profitability, liquidity, and growth, and then provide an assessment of the overall health of the firm’s finances. Include a detailed analysis of the Company’s Dupont Formula.
- Assess the Company’s value chain compared to key rivals to identify best practices and/or areas needing improvement.
- Use the resource-based view to identify the competencies and skills the firm has that provide the organization with a competitive advantage. Summarize the impacts of the company’s resources in providing a competitive advantage (Be Specific).
- Conduct a SWOT analysis on the company and include pertinent financial assessment aspects revealed by your answer to question 7.
CORRESPONDING NUMBER FOR EACH ANALYSIS NEEDED!!!! PLEASE READ TO HAVE BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT IS BEING ASKED.
7.CSA + discussion
In your major case, this section will be a continuation of the KSF (i.e., you will be using the KSFs as your competitive strengths in the major case assignment). However, for your second mini case you will need to come up with your own competitive strengths. Thus, you will approach this section similar to how you did your KSFs in the first mini case. That is, first determine 3-4 key success factors or competitive strengths. As a reminder, competitive strengths or KSFs are essentially what you need in the industry to be successful. Again, the competitive strengths should be specific to the industry. You should also assign them percentage weights to give some indication of their importance.
Now here is the part that starts to differ from what you did in the first mini case. You will now rate both companies as to how well they do in regard to each competitive strength on a scale of 1-10. You then multiply the company ratings by the percentage weights for each competitive strength to get a weighted score. Add up all the weighted scores for each company, which ever company scores higher as a whole is the competitively stronger company. You should present all of this information in a table. Once you have built your CSA table then dedicate about a paragraph to discussing the findings.
8.Dupont/Profitability, Liquidity and Growth + summary of impacts
For companies that you have data for calculate the analyses for each year, if you have data for multiple companies then make a table for each company. You should be calculating ROS, Asset Turnover, Leverage, ROA, ROE, and Compound annual growth rate. Present all of your calculations and ratios in a table. The text and slides show how to calculate all these figures.
Discuss what each ratio communicates and how well the companies stack up to each other. You should end with an overall assessment as to which company is in better financial health.
ROS, ROA, ROE: profitability
Leverage: debt/liquidity
Asset Turnover: Efficiency
9.Value Chain analysis
Look for any information in the case that discusses how the companies obtain products and deliver them to the customer. Sometimes, you might find financial data in terms of cost of raw materials, warehouse fees, sales, wages, and so forth. You should spend no more than 2 paragraphs on this section.
10.Resource based view analysis
In this section you should look at the focal company’s resources (i.e., competitive assets). Identify about 2 resources per company that you think are central to that company’s strategy/operations, be as specific as possible. Then subject the resources to the VRIN criteria and see if they hold up as resources that could potentially create a competitive advantage. If a resource is valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable then it is likely to create a competitive advantage. You may want to revisit the lecture/textbook to review VRIN. Lastly, dedicate a paragraph to discuss what you found. This section needs a VRIN table
11.SWOT + summary
List the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the focal company. Given your assessment, spend some time discussing the company’s outlook (about 1 paragraph).