MKTG 3113 Report: Analysing Wesfarmers' Business Development

This report analyzes the business growth of Wesfarmers, an Australian multinational company. It explores the company's competitive advantages, highlighting strategies like cost leadership and product differentiation. The report examines Wesfarmers' business strategies, focusing on attracting customers, employee development, and leveraging technology for growth. It discusses the evolution of business resources, including cash management, staffing, and locations, and how these have adapted to dynamic market trends. The report further investigates Wesfarmers' integration of technology across various business functions, emphasizing the positive impacts on customer base expansion and e-commerce. It also acknowledges potential disadvantages, such as extended working hours and supply chain restrictions. The analysis concludes with a discussion of how Wesfarmers prioritizes technology to enhance customer interaction and maintain a competitive edge in the retail market.

MANAGEMENT

Contents
Selection of business..................................................................................................................2
Steps to attain strong competitive advantage.............................................................................2
Business resources continuing to grow......................................................................................2
Integration of technology to grow business...............................................................................3

Selection of business
For the report, the selected business is Wesfarmers that is an Australian multinational
company, which deals in fertilisers, industrial products, safety products, and retail items. The
company`s operations employ more than 220000 people with largest revenue of AUD $ 65.98
billion in 2016 (Wesfarmers, 2019).
Steps to attain strong competitive advantage
In order to gain highest competitive advantage, Wesfarmers has explored many some critical
success factors to attain competitive advantage. The techniques used for success are
embracing the technology and automation to enhance the growth. The company must use
porter generic strategies, which include cost leadership and product differentiation. By
cutting the cost of wholesale chain, the retail sector have started contacting to farmers for
grocery and give them chance to grow (Purkayastha, & Sharma, 2016). Many supermarkets
Wesfarmers have followed this strategy of becoming cost leader with differentiated products.
As far as the product differentiation is concerned, it is seen that low-pricing services has
enabled them to keep several differentiated products related to daily needs of the customers at
the single place (David, & David, 2016).
Business strategy
Wesfarmer’s business level strategies focus on organisation’s position in market with the help
of competitors and their relative analysis. The strategy will help to maximise the production
where strategies are developed to develop the needs of consumers. The strategy should be
formed to achieve goals and visions of sustaining maximum business.
It will include attracting the customers, paying considerable amount to their employees, and
training them in a better way. The administrators give clients as one of strength, which has
24*7 accessible clients support in online sales. The Wesfarmers strategy comes up with

accelerating the sales density, increasing growing space, driving strong food growth,
extended value leadership, simplifying, improving supply chain, in-store, and above store
operations. The company has been offering differentiated new growth channels through
technology (Nagle, 2018).
Business resources continuing to grow
With the increasing dynamic business trends, the Wesfarmers will have to change its
resources and its management. For the cash management, the company have started
depending on technology such as SAP and tally to maintain their accounts. Marketing
managers are suggested to effective strategies by improving the employee`s communication
skills that includes brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality, brand loyalty, and
developing brand equity.
Staffing – HR department will consider virtual team meetings also as the company often
recruits freelancers to accomplish their targets. For the human resources, the company would
restrict the employment on the basis of their educational qualification. HR department further
undertakes to avail proper training to the employees for the marketing and finance segment.
Cash management-
Owner- A owner has to continuously remaining updated with the technological trends so that
it can standalone from the competitors. For example- first mover will always have an
advantage of having higher customer trust (Drelichowski, Olszewski, & Sikora, 2016).
Locations-
This includes logistics, which establish strong relationship between suppliers with the help of
online mode of payments. This will check whether each retail store of the company has to
adequate sum of goods or not. It will include manufacturing and other service operations,

which is ready to process raw materials and launch it in market by offering it to the customers
(Singh, Verma, & Verma, 2019).
Integration of technology to grow business
With the enhancement of technological trends, it is seen that Retail Company can get higher
profitability by increasing their customer base through promotional activities with social
media enabling. Technological integration in distribution, marketing, human resource, and
production that need retail company to actually realise the importance of technology. This
includes automation software, product design, data analytics, and technology enabled
customer services (Ranjith, 2016).
Positive impact of technology on Wes farmer’s success includes technology has led to greater
business performance because of millennial changing demand and the behaviour has enforced
them to affect position of retail brands and positioning of themselves. E-commerce has been
continuing to become most popular tool, which has forced the company to have online
presence and offer them comparable price (D’agostini, Nam, & Kang, 2019). Some of the
disadvantages of operating through technology is the unlimited number of working hours for
delivery. When adopting technology, it faces issues from vertical supply restriction.The
business model of Wesfarmer will employ technology at the priority because since 2019, the
market has defined emerging technology as customers interact with their preferable brands
faster than who does not use technology. The business model including technology can
definitely continue to push retail brands by adding layers and adding new experiences rather
than using the traditional retail models (Eidizadeh, Salehzadeh, & Esfahani, 2017).

References
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