Business Management: Strategic Planning for Organizational Growth

This report provides an in-depth analysis of strategic planning and business management principles crucial for company growth in today's fast-paced technological environment. It emphasizes the importance of communication, marketing, finance, and strategy in overcoming internal and external challenges. The study reviews both a small-scale advertising company (Maxus) and a large-scale supermarket chain (Coles) to illustrate how these management concepts differ and coincide across various organizational sizes. Recommendations for Coles include implementing GPS systems and machine learning to enhance customer experience, while Maxus is advised to adopt cost-effective cloud technologies to improve communication and digital connectivity. The report also explores the financial implications and impacts of these changes on the companies, focusing on data visualization, customer behavior insights, and effective human labor.

Abstract
In this fast pacing world of technology and communication, a business company needs to be
creative and evolving in its strategic planning to have a foot in the market. No matter if a
company is big or small; there is a need to understand some basic fundamentals of business
management. Communication, marketing, finance, and strategy are those important topics
that need to be addressed while talking about the growth of a company. A clear and profound
strategy needs to be developed to deal with the internal and external challenges faced by a
company. In this paperwork, the in-depth understanding of these various concepts of
management is provided that will eventually help in improving business operations by
adopting new technologies and improving current communication and networking inside the
companies. To get a better knowledge, one small-scale company and one large-scale
company have been selected for the review so that one can understand how business
management differs and coincide in both the sectors.
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Table of Contents
Abstract.................................................................................................................................................1
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................3
Company I- The Coles............................................................................................................................4
Recommendations.............................................................................................................................4
Financial Implications........................................................................................................................5
Impact of changes in the company....................................................................................................6
Company II- Maxus................................................................................................................................8
Recommendations.............................................................................................................................8
Financial Implications........................................................................................................................9
Impact of changes in the company....................................................................................................9
Conclusions..........................................................................................................................................11
References...........................................................................................................................................12
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Introduction
Business telecommunications and networking is a vital part of an organization that allows
sharing of information and data inside a company and helps to create networks outside the
company that will eventually increase the scope of the company and hence increase its profit
margins. Marketing of its product will allow more people across the globe to know about it
and hence more clients can be accompanied for its further operations. All the strategic
planning in an organization requires corporate financing and an effective cost-efficient
planning that needs to be implemented (Hatten, 2015). Organizations with small or large
turnovers require advanced technologies to improve their communication levels and fast
operational speed in the organization. Considering all the above factors, this research is based
on organizational growth of two companies, The Coles and Maxus organization. The Coles is
a large scale supermarket company based in Australia that is highly influenced by business
telecommunications. Maxus organization is a small scale advertising and marketing company
that has local customer base. This research will help in gaining an in-depth knowledge of
networking structure of companies and the other policies and strategies they can adapt to
increase their customer-base and adopting new technologies to improvise their
communication levels (Frank, 2016).
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Company I- The Coles
The Coles is an Australia based supermarket company that provides retail and consumer
services headquartered in Melbourne with an average revenue of 3,000 crores AUD. It has an
employee base of about 100,000+ and located in 801 cities all around the globe. It is founded
by George Coles in 1914 with Wesfarmers as its parent company and holds up to 40 percent
of Australian retail market till date. The URL of Coles is https://www.coles.com.au/.
The mission statement of Coles is to do good to get good. Coles have been supporting
Australian farmers and provide local products to its customers by sourcing Australian
products at its store. Coles have been providing nurture funds to farmers to set up urban
farming plants in the city. It believes in providing and responsibly delivering sustainable,
new, and innovative products to be found at their supermarkets instead of the traditional ones.
The company has the vision to get more involved with its local communities and reducing its
environmental impact by supporting natural methodologies and reducing emission intensity
in their workplace. Their vision includes an equal opportunity for all and career growth for
their employees. Coles has also started providing financial services to its customers by
offering home, car and landlord insurance with around a million customer base. It has fuel
stores and hotels as well apart from supermarkets (Sundsøy, 2014).
Recommendations
Coles supermarkets are consuming a large part of the Australian market and have a huge
customer base, hence they need to constantly evolve and try to improve their customer
experience. In the hustle of supermarkets, it would be a boon to have a GPS system in the
store so that customers can locate the product they need to buy using their mobile phones and
can save hours of aimless searching. A mobile app can be created of the store that has the
whole map of the store along with a list of items. The customer can enter his shopping list in
the app and can be navigated to different departments to locate all things that he needs.
Indoor navigation and augmented reality will serve high on customer experience. As per
recent researches, it has been found that Coles along with IBM is working on installing radio
tags on its every product so that the customer can pay its bill using the mobile app and while
leaving the store the items can automatically be read and verified (Perlich, 2014). This can be
implemented with the scanning of items by using the mobile apps where phone camera can
be used to scan the barcode of the item. Internet of Things is a strong technology that can be
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used to implement all these above factors as its capacity to embed IoT devices in everyday
objects to share data can be utilized while working with these factors. IoT is reliable,
optimizing and operational to use.
Coles is recommended to use Machine Learning that can be used to analyze the customer’s
shopping list on a regular basis and determining the things they are interested in buying and
can provide them with offers and discounts on that item that will increase Coles’ sales.
Machine learning uses statistical data to allow computers to learn new things on its own,
without being programmed and helps in improving customer experience (Frank, 2016). This
field of Artificial Intelligence allows the automatic analytical model building to identify
patterns, learn from those patterns and data and helps in decision making with minimal
human efforts. This technology has been adopted by very few supermarkets in the business.
Hence, it will be easy for Coles to adopt this new technology and can work with it to gain a
huge success. This will lead Coles to provide a completely new environment for its customers
by providing them an all over easy and convenient way to shop without any hustle of
standing in large queues at the cashier and an easy go through. This will have large benefits
for Coles with less maintenance cost and effect on its balance sheets.
Financial Implications
Machine learning becomes pervasive as it is being adopted by many companies across the
globe. With its promising benefits and automated routine tasks, it provides customers with
suggestions to buy what based on their past shopping behavior. ML algorithms and chatbots
are proven to generate more leads than ever before and provide enhanced customer
experience. The main aim of a company is to increase its scope by reducing risks to health,
safety, and environment. Companies try to enhance their capital efficiency and reducing
operational cost with an aim to achieve high operational benefits (Perlich, 2014).
The one time cost of implementing ML in a company can be high but it will come with huge
benefit ratios in near future. The cost factor of ML can be reduced by providing well-
organized data structures as it will be easy to work with. The growth of ML has been
significantly visible as just a few years back, it was adopted by giant companies like Google,
Microsoft, etc but now a large number of companies, especially shopping portals are adopting
it using the various tools and frameworks. Once implemented, it will not require any
immediate costs and can be used in numerous ways that will eventually increase sales and
can recover the initial implementation costs.
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Impact of changes in the company
It is important for a company to review all the best and worst possibilities of a new
technology before adopting and implementing it in their network architecture. Before
implementing a technology, it is a must to know all the impact of that technology on the
business, be it good or bad. Introducing new technology will come up with a different set of
challenges for managers than the work of project administration. This section will review the
impact of implementing Machine learning in Cole’s supermarkets.
Introducing Machine learning in Coles will hold managers responsible to bring this new
technology in routine by educating and guiding the employees of the company to be able to
match with its functionality and manage its implementation. Machine learning will impact
business in following ways:
Data visualization- When new products will be launched by the company, data won’t be
limited to a database or warehouse but real life data of practical situations will be required.
Machine learning will help in visualizing data and helps decision makers in making quick and
easy decisions based on digestible facts and scenarios. Machine learning automatically
creates critical analysis reports and review business intelligence to get an insight on how to
exceed the key metrics of the company. Information perception developed in light of the fact
that information showed graphically takes into consideration a less demanding cognizance of
the data, approving the familiar maxim, a photo is justified regardless of a thousand words.
Data visualization instruments have been imperative in democratizing information and
investigation and making information driven bits of knowledge accessible to specialists all
through an association it actively monitors the negative and positive key personnel that can
affect the performance of key metrics and communicate the need to change the existing
communication infrastructure (Perlich, 2014).
A better vision of customer behavior- Getting an insight of business to mine existing
products’ trends to predict the future demand of products can be successfully implemented to
effectively meet customer needs and stand a chance in the competitive market (A.M., 2014).
It uses customers’ personal details to provide them with a more customized experience that
will predict their future needs. The required products based on marketing and business trends
will attract the customers and it’ll help to grow their business and some extra profits which
will enhance the vision of seeing things.
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Effective human labor- With the emergence of Machine learning, it would be easy for
companies to manage work with less human effort. It will require less manual work and
human reliance to carry out the work leading to a decrease in employment statistics. The cost
of implementing machine learning can be somewhat gained by decreasing number of
employees in the company as now the user will experience a complete virtualized shopping
environment.
By implementing ML, E-commerce will reach new heights and it will also be able to provide
a secure transaction system by identifying any fraud patterns in the transaction. Integrating
chatbots with the business will be a huge development in recent future as it will provide a
quick and impeccable customer service (Kamble, 2014).
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Company II- Maxus
Maxus is an advertising and marketing firm based in Australia. It is working as a small-scale
enterprise with less than 100 employees as its base. It mainly provides digital marketing
strategies to its customers with increasing search engine ranks and data analyzing and other
media planning activities that provides its customers to increase their market scope.
The mission statement of this company is to provide a healthy platform to its clients for
effective communication and network building. Its vision is to provide organizations with
online advertising and digital marketing schemes that will help them to grow their business.
Its main work is technology based and dedicated to solutions providing a company’s growth.
Along with marketing, the company provides better communication channels and advertising
content in a creative manner (Gillespie, 2017).
Recommendations
Maxus, being a small-scale enterprise, should adopt technologies that are cost-effective and
result effectively for the company. The company’s main business depends upon
communication and digitally connecting to a worldwide base to promote their customer’s
products and business. Hence, it will be a better option for them to shift their business on
cloud systems as it will allow them to get a better access to data and efficient communication
in the organization. It will ensure that they can access their business from anywhere. A
regular availability of business is necessary for companies promoting digital marketing and
hence cloud is the best suitable platform for Maxus (Laudon, 2016).
Another recommendation that would work great with Maxus’ company requirements is the
use of Machine Learning in its digital marketing strategies. Recently Google has launched its
machine learning tool Rank Brain which contributes to the search results of Google. Its
launch has embarked a question in the market about how machine learning can impact digital
marketing. With the use of machine learning, Maxus organization can choose data analytic
tools and algorithms to decide upon a better advertising structure and campaign for their
clients. It will help in mining data to decide the optimal target audience of our client and
dynamically creates statistical models to get the information of the users to whom we can
pitch about our products. Machine learning has impacted almost all the business fields and
advertising is not an exception. The one of the best and coolest features of ML is to determine
the performance of an ad program even before its launch (Desai, 2014). Maxus can also use
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social media platforms and tools as its networking medium to hire its team and communicate
with wide range of audience.
Financial Implications
The shift to cloud-based services will ensure low costs as it is a small-scale enterprise and it
will maintain information at low rates. Cloud systems are one time investments and would
not require any further investments in tools and equipment for storing data. Machine learning
costs will be high as compared to cloud system but it will also be one-time investment and it
will ensure better strategies that will result in better marketing of products and hence the
client base will eventually increase for the company (Global, 2016).
Using social media as a platform for marketing of their products will also reduce their costs
as it will reduce the need to launch expensive campaigns. Anything shared on social media
can outreach everywhere in the world as 90 percent of world’s population is using one or
other social media platform and this way of promotion has access to the largest audience.
Along with promoting its products, Maxus can develop their relations and communications
with people all over the world. It provides a direct contact with the targeted audience and
hence reviews about the product and services can be directly obtained from viewers on social
media platforms. These reviews will help the company to improve their campaign and reach
more effectively to the audience next time. Money related ramifications implies any sort of
move made by you which is affecting or having positive or negative ramifications on your
budgetary point of view in the market. When something has monetary ramifications, the
"suggestions" include both positive results, for example, cash coming in or stock offers being
obtained, and so on, and negative results, for example, obligation and demolish (Witten,
2016).
Impact of changes in the company
Adopting a new technology in a company will lead to multiple changes in that company and
before starting the process of implementing changes technically; the employees of the
company should be made technically apt with the usage of new technologies and should be
mentally prepared to adopt these new changes in the system. Change is the only persistent
thing in this emerging world where every now and then some new technologies are invented
to make this world a better place. By adopting cloud system, the company would be able to
directly connect to social media platforms and communicate with their clients and customers
regarding their opinions and concerns. It is more effective than the traditional method of
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communication and will allow operations to be performed from a different location with files
and documents accessible by only authorized users.
Adopting machine learning in digital marketing and advertising industry will prove to be a
big boon by Maxus in upcoming years as it will decrease their efforts and increase the output.
ML will help in getting real-time bidding decisions with the given knowledge of its past
performance metrics. It can access the probability of each outcome to be positive or negative.
It will also help in grouping target audience with same demands into a cluster that will be
presented with certain objectives. Likewise, many audience clusters will be made and
different clusters will be targeted as per their requirements and company’s product or services
(Stitelman, 2014). This will reduce the cost of targeting audience who are not interested in
that product and making way for a new audience who are more interested in that type of
advertisement (Perlich, 2014).
The machine learning algorithms can be designed in a way such that it will give a predictive
analysis of the outcome of the performance of their campaign and by that prediction, we can
make certain changes and apply advertising more effectively and efficiently. Maxus works on
a collaborative approach where it constantly needs user feedback to improve the quality of
their services and to get an insight of actual need of their customers. The advertising business
requires their employees to be well versed and effective with the technology and hence they
need to invest in the skills of their employees along with the technology (Hatten, 2015).
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Conclusions
A company or organization, be it small, medium or large scale enterprise, comes into
business with one goal to add more customers in its list and retain existing one by providing
its best services and prove to be the first and foremost choice of the consumers. Business
can’t have a secluded environment every time and is prone to fluctuations, sometimes high or
sometimes low. Hence business technologies and policies should be designed in a way to
handle both these situations and try to eliminate any error or redundancies in network
communication to work in a smooth and fast manner. The more flexible a communication
network is present in a business, the more likely it is to get the advantage of it and bag new
contracts. The communication system of a company should be strong both internally and
externally, that is employee’s communication with his employers and his clients. Advanced
technologies should be adopted by businesses to stand a chance in this rapidly evolving, fast-
paced competitive market.
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References
 Hatten, T.S., 2015. ‘Small business management: Entrepreneurship and beyond’.
Nelson Education.
 Global, F.I., 2016. ‘International Journal of Interdisciplinary Telecommunications and
Networking (IJITN)’. Energy, 8(3). Laudon, K.C., and Laudon, J.P., 2016. ‘Management information system’. Pearson
Education India.
 Gillespie, A.E. and Goddard, J.B., 2017. ‘Advanced telecommunications and regional
economic development’. In Managing the city (pp. 84-109).
 Witten, I.H., Frank, E., Hall, M.A. and Pal, C.J., 2016. ‘Data Mining: Practical
machine learning tools and techniques’. Morgan Kaufmann.
 Kamble, M.S., Desai, M.A. and Vartak, M.P., 2014. ‘Evaluation and Performance
Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms’. Neural Networks, vol. 2, p.3.
 Perlich, C., Dalessandro, B., Raeder, T., Stitelman, O. and Provost, F., 2014.
‘Machine learning for targeted display advertising: Transfer learning in
action’. Machine learning, vol. 95, no. 1, pp.103-127.
 Sundsøy, P., Bjelland, J., Iqbal, A.M. and de Montjoye, Y.A., 2014, April. ‘Big data-
driven marketing: how machine learning outperforms marketers gut-feeling.’
In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and
Prediction (pp. 367-374).
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