Case Study Analysis: Motorola's Global Operations Strategy and Success

This case study analyzes Motorola's international business strategy, detailing its evolution from a US-centric firm to a global leader in mobile communication. It explores Motorola's adoption of Six Sigma quality control, its SWOT analysis, and its competitive strategies against Japanese firms. The case study examines Motorola's commitment to customer satisfaction, its resource deployment, and its operational excellence across six continents. It also highlights the company's participative management program and its focus on innovation in product and manufacturing leadership. The analysis includes references to key ingredients for successful Six Sigma implementation, critical success factors, and the impact of corporate communication strategies on consumer responses. The study emphasizes Motorola's primary business strategies of differentiation, cost leadership, and responsiveness, all aimed at achieving competitive advantage in the global market and addresses the firm's efforts to adapt to the changing technological landscape and maintain its market share.

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Motorola’s strategy

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1. Components of Motorola’s international strategy
Motorola has started its business in Chicago in 1928. The objectives of the company are to
attain total customer satisfaction and increase its market share in the global market. In order to
achieve competitive advantage in international market they are becoming best in marketing,
technology, services, products, and manufacturing. Motorola’s international strategy and its
components are the way of doing and conducting business, the way they allocate their resources
and how they do for performing well. It also includes synergy, distinctive competence,
operations, and resource deployment. They adopted the strategy of learning from the Japanese
and competing directly with them by adopting the strategy of six sigma quality, reducing the
total time of cycle, improving profits, application of environmental, product and manufacturing
leadership and adopting the cooperative and creative workplace for employees. Worldwide
operation of Motorola is defined as a scope of operation. In order to generate over 56% revenue
from abroad, they focus on controlling the market share of products (Antony and Banuelas,
2002).
For the strategy of resource deployment, they had adopted the strategy by boosting the
budget for the research and development and providing training to the employees globally. They
provide the commitment to providing the best quality as it is their distinctive competence in
global market. it includes the six sigma quality as it includes the three levels: management
system, metrics, and methodology. They had adopted the DMAIC model in their process for
improving the quality. DMAIC includes the defining opportunity, measuring performance,
analyzing opportunity, improving performance and controlling performance. In order to meet the
customers’ expectations, Motorola tries to lead in all segments to compete with competitors and
emerging in the global market. Motorola adopts the competitive strategy by doing customization
and flexibility. For making effective decisions all the levels of the company are involved
(Banuelas Coronado and Antony, 2002). Motorola’s participative management program is
contributed by the Non-executive employees and employees work together for achieving the
assigned goals and aim. In order to assess the progress in team and their quality goals, PMP team
meets with the employees to identify the new initiatives and solve the problems at the workplace.
Within team, recommendations are shared for rewarding the work which is of high quality.
Training is provided for increasing productivity and quality.

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2. SWOT analysis.
A SWOT analysis includes assessments of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and
threats. Motorola is a leader worldwide in providing wireless communications, services,
components, and systems of advanced electronics. They had invented technology and controlled
the U.S emerging market in 1980 by inventing wireless communication devices like pagers,
radios of high frequency and cellular telephones. In worldwide they maintain the facilities of
services, sales, and manufacturing and conduct their business in six continents and they have
more than 139,000 employees around the world. They had made a commitment to deliver
customer satisfaction, bringing new standards for quality and continuous improvement (Kim,
2011). Their weakness is that they maintained their old strategies for doing business and it was
unambitious and conservative. They failed in competing with emerging Japanese firms.
Motorola has an opportunity to compete and expand their business globally. They can face
new information, communication, and technology for new discoveries. Motorola has a threat of
Japanese firms as they provide the electronics as lead the market in terms of quality and cost.
They have a barrier to entry and threat of substitute, they have a high degree of rivalry in the
global market. with the help of SWOT analysis, Motorola can adopt an effective strategy for
doing the business. In order to achieve the mission, strategy is one of the most important for the
plan of organizations. An effective strategy helps in achieving the mission and reaching the
overall goal of the business. In order to exploit new opportunities and strengths, avoiding
weakness and neutralize threats. Motorola has created the broad-based goals which help in
committing to lower the costs and improve the quality in the business. They had adopted the
strategy to send the managers to learn for competing better with the competitors (Phaal, et al.,
2015).
3. Motorola’s primary business strategy
The business strategy of Motorola is to achieve the mission of the business. The business
strategy of the company is differentiation, cost leadership and response for providing and
achieving competitive advantage. Six sigma is the primary strategy of Motorola. Motorola's
commitment is to provide the quality and they set the goal of sex sigma in the operations of

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production and manufacturing. Six Sigma is used as a tool and technique for improvement of
process. It helps in identifying and removing the causes of errors for improving the quality. Six
Sigma also helps to minimize the variability in process of business and manufacturing of
products. in order to evaluate the quality of a process that is based on calculation are set up by
the Motorola(Antony, et al., 2015). In Six Sigma, the top of the scale includes the defect-free
with 99.9997%. In order to understand and manage the customer requirements, the company
adopts the Six Sigma for improving methodology in business as it helps in key aligning the
processes of business according to the requirements and it is essential to utilize the data analysis
for minimizing the variations in the process of business (Pyzdek, 2003).
Motorola has applied a management system for learning and using the metrics and
applications of methodology for business improvement and sustainability. Six sigma is also
helpful for the high-performance systems in executing the strategy in business. It also plays like
a top-down solution for helping Motorola in achieving goals and objectives. In order to attack the
high impacts projects they choose to mobilize the teams. Six Sigma helps in providing the
framework to give the priority to resources in various projects which helps in improving the
metrics and provides the leverage to leaders for managing the efforts for sustainability, rapid and
improved results of business.

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Reference
Antony, J., & Banuelas, R. (2002). Key ingredients for the effective implementation of Six
Sigma program. Measuring business excellence, 6(4), 20-27.
Antony, J., Svensson, C., Ba-Essa, M., Bakhsh, M., & Albliwi, S. (2015). A Lean Six Sigma
program in higher education. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management.
Banuelas Coronado, R., & Antony, J. (2002). Critical success factors for the successful
implementation of six sigma projects in organisations. The TQM magazine, 14(2), 92-99.
Kim, S. (2011). Transferring effects of CSR strategy on consumer responses: The synergistic
model of corporate communication strategy. Journal of Public Relations Research, 23(2),
218-241.
Phaal, R., Farrukh, C., & Probert, D. (2015, March). Roadmapping for strategy and innovation.
In IEE Seminar on justifying and selecting innovation projects.
Pyzdek, T. (2003). The six sigma. McGrow-Hill, New York.