Strategic Plan
Essays

n spite of the struggling economy throughout the country, United Healthcare industries ascended in development and improved their year over year incomes by 9% in 2010. They had found a way to widen their customer foundation by 1.5 million people. The economy disorder was an important motive for the development in Medicaid program contribution increasing nearly 16% from year to year.

Amazon's remarkable ascent as one of the top online global retailers can be attributed to the foresight they had in creating a comprehensive distributed order management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and e-commerce series of systems. The many other e-commerce sites that rose quickly with massive infusions of venture capital just as quick exited the market, flaming out due to a lack of system and process scalability, lack of understanding of customer dynamics, and a complete loss of focus on scalable business models. All of these factors are what caused competitors to Amazon to exit the e-commerce market either through acquisition, merger or complete exist from the market. When starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos invested heavily in the distributed order management, ERP, SCM and e-commerce integration points to book distributors initially, and then expanded into a broader product mix. This allowed the enterprise to quickly scale as volumes increased during the first five years of the company's existence. Having creating this reliable, scalable and secure platform, Mr. Bezos and the Amazon founders concentrated on creating an analytics layer throughout their architecture that could quantify customer, distributor, dealer and even competitor activity on the site (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). This reliance on analytics also gave Amazon executives and technical staff the insight they needed to launch quickly into entirely new product categories, get the complex and often confusing task of localization right, and also create a highly popular and profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform and hosting platform for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications (Mitchell, 2012). From a technology standpoint the performance of Amazon today can be directly attributed to the insightful decisions made in 1994 and 1995 when the company founders prioritized the development of enterprise-wide platforms and a strong focus on analytics over spending all their time on the front-end website and its façade (Lindic, Bavdaz, Kovacic, 2012). As Jeff Bezos would later remark in interviews, by investing to create a truly world-class enterprise back-end system first, his company was freed up to fast track the actual user interface of the e-commerce sites globally at a pace that left comp[editors far behind in terms of functionality and product breadth (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Mr. Bezos chose in 2007 to also institute a culture of metrics that also capitalized on the nearly two decades of investment in their infrastructure (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Combining the global e-commerce, enterprise-tested infrastructure and the most robust set of analytics that any e-commerce provider had, Amazon was ready to begin expanding their product strategies, start offering greater options in their Amazon Web Services initiative which today is expected to be a $1B by 2015, even by conservative forecasts (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012) and also invest heavily in their state-of-the-art recommendation engine technology that seeks out products and services customers may be interested in and present them during shop[ping sessions in real-time (Sun, 2012). It's important to appreciate just how vast of an e-commerce infrastructure Amazon has in completing this analysis of their e-strategy. They have greater agility, flexibility and capability to execute than any other online retailer globally today. How they choose to use these technologies to attract new customers and keep existing ones loyal, a point the case study makes in greater detail, is predicated on the ability to get the most value from this infrastructure while still staying focused on delivering a world-class customer experience in each transaction. Based on the analysis undertaken for this case analysis, it is abundantly clear that Jeff Bezos and the executive management team are passionate about keeping the company as customer-focused as possible, including the continual selective use of technology to accentuate and strengthen the user experience online and off (Murphy, Narkiewicz, 2010). With these foundational aspects of Amazon defined, the seven areas of focus in this analysis are next presented. The overarching objective of this analysis is to understand the value of e-strategies in organizations, with Amazon being the organization of interest in the analysis. Specifically concentrating on the benefits of having an e-strategy at Amazon, defining how e-strategies contribute to Amazon's broader accomplishments, and an analysis of how Amazon aligns their e-strategy to the overarching organizational strategy as well., The analysis continues with an analysis of the key business factors that are the catalysts of the e-strategy at Amazon, followed by a suggested strategic plan for ensuring e-strategy initiatives at the company continue to lead to profitable growth. The final section of this analysis provides an assessment of the technical infrastructure needed to accomplish the proposed strategic plan. As Amazon has continually evolved its position as a global force in online retailing, its command of supply chains globally has also evolved very quickly. In the latest rankings of the highest-performing supply chains completed by Gartner, a leading research consultancy, Amazon has ranking within the top twenty five for five years running (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). What this signals is that Amazon has progressed from relying on enterprise-wide infrastructure to compete and is now on the growth trajectory of making supply chain processes their competitive advantage.

SMC (Schneck Medical Center) is a nonprofit healthcare organization that provides specialized and primary care services. The medical center focuses on the health of women, noninvasive cardiac care, bariatric surgery, cancer care and joint replacement Most of SMC care is provided in the organization's major facility situated in Seymour. Schneck Medical Center holds a powerful dedication to its volunteers, physicians and employees. More importantly, SMC constantly shows high performance levels with respect to patient-centered measures of health care. Services at SMC are offered through health screenings, support groups, educational initiatives, home care and partner physician offices

Cabarrus Memorial Hospital is based in North Carolina. This is a hospital that serves people from different areas of Cabarrus County. The board of governor held a meeting, and they had a lot on the table. Many questions had to be laid down in order to assess the way forward. The reason for this program was because the heart patients who needed surgery in Cabarrus had to travel long distances on referral for the operations. Cabarrus Memorial hospital is located at crossroads, and from the map, we see there is a road connecting it to Duke University Memorial Hospital, and it is also connected to Kannapolis and concord. Cabarrus Memorial hospital is a well equipped hospital. It has all the equipment needed for cardio surgeries, and this gives competition to the other existing hospitals. The hospital has had ample affiliate programs in conjunction with Duke University. Cabarrus Memorial Hospital had to get the open heart surgery program because its service area was highly growing. Every new program is met with challenges. The board of

Navistar International Corporation, formerly known as International Harvester Company, is a U.S. based holding company that owns the manufacturer of International brand commercial trucks. It is located in Warrenville, Illinois, with about 500 employees and revenues of almost $10 billion. Through a network of about 1,000 dealer outlets in North and South/Central America, and more than 90 global countries, it sells parts and contracts for services for large truck machinery. Most recently, the company has moved into financing for its customers and distributors, adding that niche to its marketing base (Navistar.com). The company has been vociferously criticized for spending over $6 million on lobby and not paying corporate taxes from 2008-10, instead receiving over $18 million in tax rebates – all the while making a profit of almost $900 million and increasing executive pay by over 80%

This reference material provides insight into the strategic plan of Coca-Cola. This plan highlights many aspects of the business including competitive advantages and daily beverage consumption statistics. The plan also provides a basis for the company to generate sales and grow organically. The plan concludes with a brief description of the legal and regulatory issues the company may face in future years.

Subway Restaurants is a privately-held corporation with estimated annual revenues in the $5B range, operating 45,000 locations throughout 100 countries globally. Subway is a subsidiary of Doctor's Associates, a company founded by company founded by Peter Buck and Fred DeLuca in 1965 with a $1,000 investment in a sandwich shop on Long Island, NY (Nawrocki, 2006). Market share varies significantly by country and region of the world, with their largest market share being in the U.S. and throughout North America, with nearly 35% of total available market for quick service restaurants (QSR) in this region. Their market share through Europe and the Middle East is small, and growing quickly given the brand identity becoming more universally known The company's production and operations department is responsible for translating the strategic plan into a series of strategies and programs, enabling their fulfillment in the process. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate Subway's continual quest for quality, with specific focus on the production and operations management function. There are many aspects of quality management from the enterprise-level in QSR businesses in general and foodservice specifically (Field, 2009). And while quality management benchmarks and programs are often put into place for all types and variations of businesses that serve food, in the QSR industry has continually adopted and relied o the 14 points from Dr. Edward Deming with regard to production and operations management (Blair, 1997). The Subway Restaurants' Production and Operations Management departments are heavily reliant on these principles with communication being the most critically important of all to their success. The intent of this analysis is to illustrate how Subway is attaining critical quality goals while at the same time strengthening their business to be more resilient in the face of significant economic and industry change.

Electronic medical records have various advantages in healthcare systems. This is a case study on the implementation of an electronic medical records system designed by Epic systems. It focuses on the driver of implementation, players and stakeholders involved in the implementation, challenges faced and how they can be resolved and the key factors for success of implementation.

Alcan's continued revenue growth is the result of the combined success of increasing sales in four main business units, in addition to growth through acquisition. The cumulative effects of these two factors have served to create a profitable business and one where a highly decentralized organizational structure dominates (Chang, Wang, 2011). The catalyst of the organization becoming so decentralized is the continued revenue gains made across four businesses, each competing in market areas that face heavy pricing and commodity-like market conditions. Despite the heavily process-centric based approaches the industry takes to supply chain management, production and distribution, Alcan has been also able to profitably grow sales in the more mature markets they compete in. The senior management and IT departments credit the highly decentralized nature of the enterprise-wide systems that run the company. During the time period of the case, Alcan generated $23.6B in sales in 2006, and has 68,000 employees throughout its global operations that span 61 countries. The four major groups include Primary Metal, Engineered Products, Packaging and Bauxite & Alumina. Each of these business groups have their own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and IT infrastructure. They each also have their own maintenance contracts with enterprise software vendors including SAP who the company pays approximately $100M a year in maintenance fees to. There are also the costs of operating over 400 different pricing systems, many of which duplicate functions across divisions as well. The new CIO of the company, Robert Ouellette, enters into a challenging situation and one that will require a completely different IT and organizational structure to succeed. Organizational Environment The Alcan organizational environment is highly decentralized to the point of there being four separate companies in the same corporation, each with its own entire value chain and supporting functions. As with the value chain concept, each of the four divisions has created its own main and supporting functions, and no two business units or divisions are the same. From the initial supply chain management and supplier quality management processes and systems to the supplier qualification, new product development, production and fulfillment including logistics, each business unit is significantly different than the other. When information systems and processes become unique to a given organizational business unit or division, the information and intelligence shared redefines the identity and over time, the core competencies of a business unit (Boh, Yellin, 2007). This is exactly what's happening in the four business units of Alcan during the time period of the case study. The Primary Metal, Engineered Products, Packaging and Bauxite & Alumina have in effect become their own companies, each with its own ERP, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and myriad of pricing and distribution systems. The case states that there are over 400 different pricing systems in place across the four business units or divisions. CIO Robert Ouellette and other senior executives see the potential for consolidating all systems together and creating a centralized IT architecture. Creating a highly centralized IT architecture and framework would require the fundamental structure of the company to change significantly. It would also require an entirely new IT architecture, followed by redefinition of processes, systems and procedures throughout the company. As the information platforms or technologies of a business define not only the performance of divisions but the structure and performance of business models over time, Robert Ouellette and his staff must think strategically as to how they will modify the overall organizational structure.

The aviation company is steadily growing and numerous companies are putting up technological efforts to ensure that necessary paraphernalia needed are availed. In doing so, the Honda Aviation Sector has set up departmental sections that deal with the production of executive and efficient jets, suitable for all air purpose. The following is an analysis of strategies that Honda Jet Corporate Flight is setting up in addressing the demands of air transport.