This is a group assignment. But i can't do my own parts. My parts was doing question 6 ( The Balanced Scorecard and the strategy map) - please use the reference by Kaplan and Norton. ( see the attached file for the Balance Scorecard)
The strategic initiatives is 'cost saving'. You can see the details of the report in strategic management.docx file i upload. So before you write the balance scorecard you need to refer to the strategic initiatives 'cost saving'.
Question 6 :
Explain how the organisation can measure the strategic initiative you proposed. Focus specifically on:a. A set of key success measures for the strategic initiative, using Balanced Scorecard.b. Draw a strategy map that indicates the key success measures and their hierarchical relationships.
At least write up to 600-700 words.
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by or on behalf of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 1. Introduction G8 Education Limited is a child care centre operator in Australia which provides high quality, developmental and educational child care services. The G8 Education was established in 2006 and subsequently listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on 5 December 2007. The company is currently operating over 520 Childcare Centres across Australia. It is supported by10,000 staff including dedicated professionals to deliver high quality developmental and educational child care services throughout Australia. G8 Education embraces a culture that promotes strong core values that drive organisational performance. Their core values of “Passion, integrity, dedication, compassion and innovation” are at the forefront of everything they do. It is labelled as generic core values and was one of many other organization using one of top three popular core statement (Johansson & Andersson 2011). It has recorded significant growth over the years and the business has grown sustainably. G8 Education invests in human capital development and retaining its team of professionals who are equipped with specialised skills and experiences to provide quality services. It allows the employees build a subordinate relationship as they remains motivated and sustains high performance due to partnership between managers and the staff causing them to not retaliating against their organisation’ objectives (Carrel et al., cited in Nassazi 2013). In ensuring the company meets its strategic objectives and maintain leadership in the childcare services, the Board and management provide close oversight on the company’s performance, talent and leadership programs, compensation and succession plan. They also review the survey results to gauge the company’s commitment to organisational values, diversity, team alignment and support. G8 Education emphasises the importance of creating a culture that values inclusion, recognises the unique contributions of its staff and builds its capability to support business growth. It set measurable objectives to increase the representation of women in senior executive management, aligned with best practices as stipulated in G8 Education Corporate Governance Principles which recommends at least 30% women participation. The company achieved commendable targets of 43% at board and 38% at senior executive level, indicating its commitment to embrace gender diversity in the organisation (G8 Education n.d.). In maintaining its standing as a reputable company, G8 Education aims at maintaining a zero-harm workplace which emphasised that safety is everyone’s responsibility and accountability. It’s commitment to a safe and healthy workforce was demonstrated through providing of safety leadership and behavioural training to staff as well as implementation of health, fitness and well-being programs. In addition, G8 Education continuously looks at ways to improve its operation and corporate social responsibility. It takes responsibility of supporting children to become environmentally responsible, and respect for the environment. It increases the awareness amongst children to care for the environment and the importance of conservation and related issues that will affect the lives of future generations. 2.1 VRIO To have a perfect strategy and achieve a huge success in the market, a firm is required to use not only one but also many effective framework such as Porter analysis, the Delta Model or the Stakeholder theory. However, to analyze and acknowledge the power of resources particularly before planning a business strategy, a firm may need to apply the resources based view as known as VRIO framework (Cardeal and Antonio, 2012). The VRIO letters in this framework stand for four components, which are value, rarity, imitability and organizational support. There are three definitions of valuable resources and how to create value for resources in a firm. First of all, according to Barney (1991), having a detail SWOT analysis is a crucial element to build value for a firm’s resource, firm has to understand clearly their traditional strength, weakness, threat and opportunities. Moreover, valuable resources are discovered if a firm has the awareness of taking advantage of opportunities and reduce some of the threats. Secondly, to create valuable resources, a firm has also focus on the requirement of customers, value is only made when companies or firms know how to satisfy customers' demand, put their product on the top of customers' mind (Amit and Schoemaker, 1993). Finally, resources are valuable when they have ability to prevent the loss, develop the profit and generate economic value. Rareness is the second component in VRIO framework, this factor is about emphasizing the unique of service or product of a firm (Blake and Boal, 1991). To illustrate, all firms have the same valuable resources which they may produce same qualification amount of goods. Therefore, unique product may create an outstanding impression to customers, make them remember specific brand when they want to buy that kind of product. The third factor of this framework is imitability, if valuable resources are difficulty to imitate, the competitive advantage of a firm will increase significantly ((Dierickx and Cool, 1989). However, if value and rare resources are based on some key people 3.1 Current generic type of business strategy Strategy is the essential part of organisation’ long term objectives and goals, advocating tasks and manage the proportion of their assets (Chandler, cited in Ogot 2012). Subsequently, G8 has mostly focus their strategy on giving high-quality services in terms of customers, education and child care. This objective is used in their mission/strategic statements and the main focus is to sustain growth for their assets and build opportunities for G8. The following key strategies G8 (2018) implemented in the annual report of 2017 was: 1. Focusing solely on customer service, education and care by investing more into training and occupancy in the existing facilities, while creating new revenue line to cover existing and new centres. 2. Engaging in an ‘Employer of Choice’ that allows the employees to compete which leads to building a better team. 3. Price allocation with acquisition to their assets and green field project for urban environmental purposes. From the statement, the following conduct used a framework to view and analyse the business type described. By doing so, the analysis of testing its strategy statement for external environment is SWOT analysis. 3.2 SWOT analysis This framework of theory consist a procedure of formulating a plan that used by professionals to analyse the organization in a critical view (Gibis et al. 2001). SWOT analysis helps the organization to assess their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities to sustain growth, and threats from external factors that bring danger to the company’ performances (Gretzky 2010). The advantages of SWOT allows G8 to allocate their verification in terms of customer satisfactions, company performance, financial assets, measure results and especially understanding barriers to changes in the healthcare industry sector. A table of summary are formed below for simple understanding for SWOT analysis which based on G8 Education Ltd of its physical, financial and human resources. Strengths Weaknesses · High satisfaction for customers trust and loyalty · Superb cash flow High rate of employee turnover Opportunities Threats · Gaining customers from online sites · Tight competition · Competitive market face lawsuits Table 1: SWOT analysis summary The following explanations of SWOT are described below in each sections according to the summary above: Strengths G8 seems to have a huge advantage in their customer services and cash flows that hold the business asset together in the market industry. The reasons are amount of training provided for the employees to be excellent skilled in the workforce and the demand for childcare is quite high in Australia. Since G8 solely focused on providing top-quality service as part of their executives, they can easily manage customers without getting any complaints. Additionally, it develops a customer trust and loyalty to G8. With the customer’ loyalty, G8 able to gain economic and other benefits for the company performance. For customer loyalty, G8 continue to keep an existing customer as they save cost on the net transaction of return and lead to being profitable to the services (Bennett & Bove 2002). Also, employee of G8 improve their loyalty as customer remain loyal to the service given due to being comfortable in their relationship and build customer retention that brings value to the company. Beneficially, loyal customers is used as marketing strategy which lead to developing into market share and customer base (Khan & Fasih 2014). Besides that, G8 operates well in their business as the cash flows are very strong with $92 million in last year 2017. Cash flow is use to indicate G8 making a choice for money subjugated to the decisions of repayment and loans (Klyuchankin 2017). The main purpose of cash flow allows the directors and managers to investing time in deciding on its innovation and long-term business (Stice et al. 2017). Good cash flow enables to condense business growth with the amount of invested in management and strategies with trends, flow gaps, better payment conditions and reliable on funds (McCabe et al. 2012). Thus, G8 have good stability and control of their financial asset. Weaknesses Although company aims to provide top-notch services, there are certain drawback from the implementation. The drawback said training is highly required and less amount of employee training quality will increase the level of turnover rate and also the results in good and services (Sommerville 2007). In order to cover that, the company have to spend a lot of time and finances on training so that the staff can improve their overall performance. Consequently, this cause financial loss that might damage the G8 revenue and profitability. The reason is that some employee are dissatisfied and left due to personal reason(s), one of the retirees in a form of review arguing the staff morale is very low and the environment is in poor condition (Indeed 2018). This statement can be subjective and bias toward G8 but personal reasons could affect the business operation and staff performance in term of demotivating staff workers to leave the workforce in G8. One major factor causing this problem, said that any organization failed to listen or attend to care on their personal reason will demotivator for employees (Hamre 2007). Opportunities Technologies has been advance and innovated as time goes on, back then, G8 adopted a new tech from the service provider called Macquarie Telecom's SD-WAN which permit the customers/parents to make video on facetime and photos that contact their children(s) from their education field (Macquarie n.d.). The area that can be take advantage