Woolworths Strategic Objectives, Problems and Requirements

This report provides an overview of Woolworths Holdings Limited, a major retail company in Australia and New Zealand, outlining its vision and mission statements, and strategic objectives. It identifies key business problems facing Woolworths, including increased competition, declining profit margins, and changing consumer perceptions. The report details the company's requirements for human resources, hardware, and software to address these challenges, including specific roles and system specifications. It further discusses the need for a robust IT infrastructure to support strategic initiatives and maintain competitiveness in the evolving retail landscape. Desklib provides access to this and many other solved assignments.

Woolworths Holdings Limited
1.0 Introduction
Woolworth limited company is large company found in Australia which has extensive interest in
retail across Australia as well as in New Zealand. Woolworth limited, by sales and market
capitalization is the largest company that deals with retailing in Australia and in New Zealand.
The company is the largest retailer in takeaway liquor, food, and the largest poker machine and
hotel operator in Australia (Ltd, 2012). The company did open its first store in the year 1924
December fifth called Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement in Sydney. Its initial nominal
capital was £25,000 though shares worth 15000 were offered to the public for subscription, by
1920s the company continued to grow with establishment of additional stores in Sydney and in
Brisbane and Perth. The company was greatly affected during the period of World War II due to
economic depression across the entire globe. Over the years, the company has tremendously
grown with strong dominance in the market in retailing through supermarkets, hotel services,
petrol stations, Leisure and Hospitality Group (ALH) among other various retailing services.
1.1 Vision Statement
“TO BE ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST RESPONSIBLE RETAILERS reflects our passionate
commitment to doing good business, for our customers, our people and our planet”
1.2 Mission Statement
“Woolworth's stated aim is to be at the heart of the community and the best loved retailer for
kids, home and family leisure”

2.0 Strategic Objectives
Woolworth pricing strategy is implemented to neutralize Coles’ impact on Woolworths’ sales.
The company has undertaken measures to lower prices, target customers offers and better
ranging by the use of improved and revised royalty system.
Woolworths Company has been facing fierce competition from its rival Coles Company which
has resulted to reduced economic market in the recent past. This has be characterized by
declining profit margins and sluggish sales. The situation has been worsened off by increased
expansion; of Aldi supermarkets in Australia. The ales of food and liquor from Woolworth
Company fell in June quarter for the first time in experience of 12 years. The food and liquor
margins of Woolworths supermarkets are projected to drop from 8 per cent in the year 2014 to
around 6.5 % by the end of 2016 fiscal year as it slash its prices on private label groceries and
national brands so to compete favorably with its rivals; Coles and Aldi. The falling sales and the
perception of consumers that the Woolworths company is more expensive than its peers,
Woolworth company is expected to reduce the shelf prices which will in the long run reduce its
margin. This will reduce the ‘economic market of Woolworths company significantly hence the
company is expected to come up with robust strategies to counteract the situation so as to survive
in the fierce competitive economic environment. This retail company has engaged in price wars
with other retail supermarket in Australia with major motive of securing large market share so as
to generate higher revenues from large volume of sales. The companies has also been using non-
price competition strategies such market research that is meant to boosts sales.
3.0 Business Problems

The company’s golden era of robust M&A, margin growth, capital organization, and sales
growth has come to an end, exerting a lot of pressure the shares.
The following are the main 10 problems Woolworth supermarket chain is at the moment
experiencing:
 A slowing consumer cycle
 The ACCC fighting back
 New Zealand supermarkets facing greater competitive pressure
 The Lowe’s put option over Masters
 Taxation and higher lease costs in hotels
 Product quality becoming an issue
 Deleverage in Australian supermarket
 A lower Australian dollar
 Changes to the Caltex-Woolworths petrol JV
 Decreasing return on equity without a de-rating
4.0 Business Requirements
Human resource requirements
DESIGNATION NUMBER REQUIRED
 CIO (Chief Information Officer): 1
 DBA (Database administrator): 2
 Project Manager: 1
 HRM (Human resources manager): 1

 Chief finance officer: 1
 Software Engineers: 3
 System Analyst 2
 Tester 2
System requirements
Hardware requirements
 Memory requirements are RAM, a minimum of 64 MB
 A minimum of PIII Supported Motherboard + 568 MHZ Pentium Processor is required.
 Hard Disk, a minimum of 40 GB SATA.
 Any Normal keyboard and mouse.
 A 1024*768, true type color- 32 Bit Display is required.
 OLAP Server
Software requirements:
 Windows XP Professional or updated versions are required as operating system.
 PHP editor (notepad ++) for frontend.
Installation requirements
Xampp 1.6 software, which is included server info given below -
+ Apache 2.2.3
+ Zend Optimizer 3.0.2
+ SQLite 2.8.15
+ phpMyAdmin 2.9.1.1
+ “MySQL 5.0.27
+ Open SSL 0.9.8d

+ “FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.20