Business decision making processes and frameworks

Business Decision-Making Process

Decision-making through Business Environmental Scanning

As a relatively new research agency in the market research industry, our firm has two main objectives for this year. The first objective is to increase profitability through increased number and/or higher research costs. The second objective, meanwhile, is to increase the firm's "visibility" in the market research industry, and be recognized as one of the major players in it. In order to achieve these objectives, our firm looked into the business environment of the market research industry, assessing its strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. The following are the considerations the firm has discussed and taken into consideration in evaluating its performance for the year, using these decisions as the basis for next year's business plan.

Currently, the market research environment is technology-centric -- that is, market research agencies and firms mainly compete with each other through the technology they have. Technologies include software that enables these agencies and firms to process data in a day or less than a day, and aid researchers in creating presentations in less than a week. Moreover, standardized researches become easier, faster, and more manageable because this software allow researchers to just provide the inputs (data), while processing and analysis will be done electronically. Even qualitative research is now analyzed electronically. In effect, the present state of market research is not only a competition about the agency's credentials, methodology, and skills of researchers, but also the availability of efficient software that would help create and develop studies in an easier and faster manner with the least incidence of errors possible.

Our firm's weakness is that it is still a new player in the industry, thus, its credibility is still being questioned because of clients' lack of familiarity with it. However, since the firm employs individuals who used to work for the major research agencies, it is able to invite a significant degree of respect and consideration by its (existing and potential) clients. The firms strengths, meanwhile, is its very efficient data processing software, wherein data processing is completed in less than 12 hours, and this is applicable for researches with a large base (more or less a thousand respondents for quantitative studies). Apart from fast data processing, the firm has an efficient team, coordinating and helping each other, enabling researchers to accomplish their projects on or earlier the stated deadline by the client.

Despite its efficient data processing, the firm's threat remains the lack of sufficient field teams that will conduct data collection, relying on sub-contractors, which may affect the quality of data that the firm will generate. However, there is an opportunity in this situation, since it makes the costing for researches cheaper. The firm just needs to carefully monitor the data collection/generation conducted by its sub-contractors.