Advent Case analysis
To: Henry Kloss, CEO Advent Corp.
From: Joselito Tulao, Senior Technical Officer
Subject: Core Competency Assessment and Recommendation on Video Business
The following memo gives a current assessment of the company based on its strengths, weaknesses and core competencies and provides recommendations on strategic directions for the new video beam business.
Company Strengths:
Technical skill and experience of being able to integrate and build upon advanced technologies to produce advanced consumer product particularly audio electronics. CEO has knack for identifying successful niche products.
Company has a good reputation for bringing out quality and value products.
Extensive distribution channels established
Has good relationships with known suppliers of advanced tech such as Kodak, DuPont, Dolby etc such that they have a floating knowledge technology base at their disposal.
Company Weaknesses:
No focused business areas, no long range planning – too much reliance on CEO’s intuition for future short term direction and lacks proper input from the staff. This will severely affect continuing prosperity for the company if ever the CEO becomes disengaged with the business.
No core technologies invented or innovated.
No established process for market forecasting, weak overall marketing in terms of researching for customer needs
Business model can be easily copied.
Company does not make full use of success in 1 product because after a “success” it tries to shift away from that line and move on to a new niche.
Company Core Competencies:
Company is able to use and integrate advances made by core materials suppliers and create an optimized electronic audio product that will create a “new” need by the market. This involves detailed competencies in:
1) ability to deal with these suppliers and maintain good relationships
2) ability to see future product needs and implement this into the physical products
3) agile manufacturing facility model to address their ever changing product line
Recommendations on Core Competencies:
The company should first and foremost develop R&D and deepen bench, this is in order to sustain their current model on integrating technologies other than relying on a single person. This can be done by investing on training, providing more autonomous product development opportunities and benchmarking with suppliers etc.
The company should also improve its marketing and customer relationship to augment its ability to provide advance products. The company has been fortunate with its forays on products with Dolby and Crolyn based audio technologies without actually seeking market opinion whether these tech advances are what they desire. Somehow, some market research would have helped. One aspect they can also develop as a tool for this market research is product prototyping. This will save them a lot [next page]