Background of Woolworths Limited
Question:
Discuss About The Company Its Overall Strategy Are Understood?
The chosen organisation is Woolworths Limited. It is an Australian company which has immense retail interest in the whole of Australia as well as New Zealand. The company is headquartered in Bella Vista, New South Wales, Australia.
It is also the largest retailer of takeaway liquor in Australia. The company operations include several segments including supermarkets, petrol, general merchandise, home improvement, liquor retailing, pubs and hotels under the Australian Leisure and Hospitality group as well as the discounted departmental stores.
The company has established itself successfully in the retail industry and is definitely a name worth reckoning with. Despite a considerable loss of revenue in the financial year of 2016, the company had an inspiring success story and hopefully will achieve the success it had previously attained.
The history of Woolworths began in the year 1924 in the year 5th December. In Sydney’s Imperial Arcade, the Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement opened for its business. It was in the year 1927 that the second store opened making it a chain. In New Zealand, the first Woolworths store was opened in 1929. By the year 1930, the company has 16 stores in New South Wales, Western Australia as well as Queensland. Despite the depression years and the problems accompanied with it the company continued to flourish. The first ever food stores of the company were launched in the 1950s. The next few years saw the company becoming one of Australia’s favourite liquor retailers. In the year 1964, the company opened its own Quality Assurance Laboratory. It was opened to ensure that the company meets the needs of the customers and there is no scope for complaint. The successive years saw several ups and downs of the company including establishment of a segment for high quality buyers as well as huge losses but the Australian icon did not fade away and continued to remain a global name.
More than one lakh and ninety thousand people are employed at Woolworths Company and it is therefore one of the largest private sector employers in Australia (Keith, 2012).
The five founders of Woolworths Limited include Percy Christmas, Stanley Chatterton, Cecil Scott Waine, George Creed and Ernest Williams. Percival Christmas was a retailer and was convinced that advertising is the key to successful retailing and was drawn towards this concept. Robert Ernest Williams was a journalist, teacher, and essentially a man of action was drawn to the retail industry after retiring from the position of clerk. Together the five individuals founded the Woolworths Limited company.
Company Operations and Segments
The company’s commitment towards hard work and integrity is extremely resolute. The down-to-earth culture as well as the family and friendly values of the company set it apart from the rest in the business market.
Every new approach of the company towards its business is developed keeping the customers in mind. The company is build under a relationship of trust and is a name to reckon with in the Australian retail market (Arli et al., 2013).
The process design team aims to internalise the key Business Process Management Capabilities. The Woolworths Limited developed the Business process management capabilities and the other developed capabilities include:
There was a development of a robust approach with thee inclusion guidelines, conventions for the activities in BPM projects at Woolworths Limited. The process design team employed relevant authorities for implementing the necessary approaches.
The initial development of the training process was supported by a consulting company on process modelling and improvement. The company’s process design team has developed the relevant material and incorporated it into the Woolworths Limited training curriculum (Jie, Parton & Chan, 2015).
The consulting team as well as the company’s process design team co-developed a specific approach to ensure the process work value is maintained as the organisation’s valuable asset. There has also been a defined governance which has been established to provide accuracy, consistency as well as relevance of the material which is process related (King & Thobela, 2014).
The business is engaged by the process design team to communicate the benefits of an organisation which is process centric as well as facilitate application of process approach to the projects.
An appropriate process improvement methodology was developed by the company and the Woolworths Academy gave training and mentoring to the appropriate personnel (Chandrasekaran & Raghuram, 2014).
Cross divisional assessment required process centric benchmarking and hence the company developed the relevant process centric approach (Cooper & Vlaskovits, 2013).
The company implemented improved capture and reuse of the Process Intellectual Property enabling the execution of the project comparatively faster (Humayun, 2016).
The company always aims to perform in a way that the customers always put it first. In order to achieve this objective, the company’s priorities are as follows:
- Building a store and customer led team and culture
- Generation of momentum of sustainable sales in Food(Visser, 2012)
- To evolve their drinks business in order to provide customers with more value and convenience
- Empowerment of portfolio business for strategy pursuance to deliver value to the shareholders
- Focus on becoming a lean retailer by end to end process and excellence of the systems (Gibson, Michayluk & Van de Venter, 2013).
The strategy of the company is simple:
- Developing one team
- Improve processes and reduce costs
- Develop a cohesive brand
- Update product offerings
- Refresh stores
There has been the change in every facet of life due to the advent of mobile technology especially in case of retail. There is the access to a variety of products at different prices to all types of customers. The customer base of the company comprises almost eighteen million. Hence it is important for the company to earn their customers’ loyalty (Frederick Rose, Hawryszkiewycz & Kang, 2014).
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Strengths: · Great market presence · Retail business understanding · Value oriented business practices · Efficient brand name as well as efficient operations (Chandrasekaran & Raghuram, 2014) · Successful own-store brands |
Weaknesses: · Revenue losses · Negligible global presence compared to competitors · Late arrival to the online market · Failed sustainability of competitive advantage |
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Opportunities: · Brand promotion through advertisement, sponsorship and advertising · Seeking growth through strategic acquisitions as well as franchise models in emerging economies (Humayun, 2016) |
Threats: · Increase in the raw material costs from both food as well as non-food impacts · Possibility of economic recession hindering the overall growth strategy of opening more stores(Cooper & Vlaskovits, 2013) · More competition from international companies. |
Table 1: SWOT Analysis
Summary and Conclusion:
The Woolworths Limited company is immensely popular and has achieved success in several areas of business which are important for any organisation which included the development of the process framework. Several projects at the company and their scope have been assisted by the frameworks.
Detailed analysis of the implementation of information systems with a specific division is carried out at specific time intervals. Clarity is provided within the project work conducted and impacts which can be changed for both the roles as well as the systems is provided. Attention was also brought towards the overall process flow for system as well as non-system oriented functions. As a result, sound decisions were made regarding the deployment strategy as well as implementation of the project.
Sessions of communication which were more or less regular were conducted with senior representatives of Woolworths’ different divisions to ensure proper communication. Information provided to the goal of Business Process management as to the utilisation of assets across the divisions was completed.
References:
Arli, V., Dylke, S., Burgess, R., Campus, R., & Soldo, E. (2013). Woolworths Australia and Walmart US: Best practices in supply chain collaboration. Journal of Economics, Business & Accountancy Ventura, 16(1).
Chandrasekaran, N., & Raghuram, G. (2014). Agribusiness Supply Chain Management. CRC Press.
Cooper, B., & Vlaskovits, P. (2013). The lean entrepreneur: How visionaries create products, innovate with new ventures, and disrupt markets. John Wiley & Sons.
Frederick Rose, J., Hawryszkiewycz, I., & Kang, K. (2014). When and how to facilitate the introduction of new knowledge processes in organisations. VINE: The journal of information and knowledge management systems, 44(2), 210-227.
Gibson, R. J., Michayluk, D., & Van de Venter, G. (2013). Financial risk tolerance: An analysis of unexplored factors. Financial Services Review.
Humayun, S. H. (2016). Merchandising operation of Woolworths Global Sourcing.
Jie, F., Parton, K., & Chan, C. (2015). Australian beef supply chain integration: case studies of the two largest Australian supermarkets. International Journal of Supply Chain and Operations Resilience, 1(2), 121-138.
Keith, S. (2012). Coles, Woolworths and the local. Locale: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies, 2, 47-81.
King, L., & Thobela, S. (2014). Woolworths farming for the future. International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, 17(B).
Visser, W. (2012). Business frontiers: Social responsibility, sustainable development and economic justice. BookBaby.
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