Environmental Scan of Two Companies: The First

Environmental Scan of Two Companies:

The first step towards an organization's strategic management is environmental canning, which involves collecting information for the internal and external of the company. Generally, environmental scan is described as the watchful evaluation and monitoring of the internal and external environments of the company to identify early indications of opportunities and threats that may affect the firm's current and future plans. Through this process, the organization can understand factors needed to achieve its short-term and long-term objectives. In light of its essence on organizational strategic management, this article focuses on examining environmental scanning in two successful American Companies i.e. McDonalds Corporation and Apple Inc. This analysis focuses on internal and external environments of these companies to understand their competitive advantages and strategies.

Internal and External Environments:

The entire process of environmental scanning is geared towards providing managers with knowledge for enhancing the long-term efficiency and creates strategic plans for the business. An organization's business environment is divided into internal and external environments with the internal environment being described as factors or components directly involved within the organization. Some of these factors include employees, managers, stakeholders, and particularly the corporate culture of the organization. On the contrary, the external environment include factors that are out of the organization's control such as the economic, technological, political, sociological, legal, and ecological factors.

As a result, an internal environmental scan helps in differentiating the organization's internal assets and requirements. On the other hand, the external environmental scan helps the organization to determine the environment issues in which the organization or business is operating in. Through combining both elements when carrying out environmental scanning, an organization shapes its strategic visions by identifying its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Organizations need to examine their internal and external environments because they do not operate in vacuums i.e. they operate in increasingly competitive industrial environments (Vijayarani, 2007).

McDonalds Environmental Scan:

Since its inception, McDonalds Corporation has continued to be a successful firm in the global fast foods industry. This continual success has resulted in its status as the leading fast food chain stores that serve approximately 40 million customers on a daily basis. McDonalds' success is partly attributed to its ability to enter markets with an existing brand culture and encourage increased expansion through franchising based on the success of its flagship stores. The corporation has also continued to provide numerous community benefits like employment opportunities for local people with knowledge of local culture. However, the main contributing factor to the success and productivity of McDonalds Corporation is an understanding of its internal and external environments. Actually, McDonalds has been successful because of its ability to create value, sustained competitive advantage, and strategic effectiveness.

The corporation thrives on its ability to provide convenience when people need and want to eat fast foods at competitive prices and offers the best value for customer's money. In order to achieve its core competency, McDonalds has several competitive advantages including its emphasis on consistency of quality, food production, and utilization of raw materials across the globe. Secondly, the company has a world recognition associated with the brand, which gives it a competitive edge over its rivals. Third, McDonalds has a speedy delivery of its foods because it has simplified the processes of cooling food for all its employees. These competitive advantages have not only enabled McDonalds to become the leading fast food chain but also enhanced its brand recognition worldwide.

McDonalds' core competency is to provide convenience for customers when they need and want to eat fast foods at reasonable prices while ensuring that customers obtain value for their money. This core competency is achieved through creating value for customers by maintaining the quality of their food items. The corporation creates value through understanding customer service excellence from an organizational and customer perspective. As part of its initiatives to deliver excellent customer service, McDonalds focuses on understanding the needs and expectations of its customers based on local cultures and customs. This is followed by employing local people with knowledge of the local culture in order to improve the level of customer service. The main strategy McDonalds has used to enhance its competitiveness is utilizing the series of public relations, strategy, and international marketing skills at its disposal. The company utilizes these skills to adapt the business framework in line with cultural values and expectations and the overall business objective. The strategic effectiveness is accomplished through standardization of the production methods and processes and willingness to innovate (Ivanova, 2011). These measurement guidelines have been effective because they have enabled the corporation to sustain its competitive advantages and introduce new products.

Apple Inc. Environmental Scan:

Apple is another American company that has experienced tremendous global success and increased international expansion. The company's success in the technology industry is attributed to its ability to provide cutting-edge products that are sold in well-designed stores and encouraging its employees to delight customers instead of forcing sales. As a result, Apple creates an organizational culture that focuses on meeting the needs of customers and exceeding their expectations while offering customer service excellence through understanding the customer. Apple has continued to achieve great success globally because of its competitive advantage of being constantly reliable in the creation of new, innovative technology accompanied by exemplary marketing strategies and product differentiation. The firm creates value and sustains competitive advantage across its business strategy through understanding the needs and desires of their customers. These needs and desires are used to develop straight-forward marketing plans to provide customers with the best new solutions. In some cases, the firm's market developers have to continually develop newer technologies and product upgrades as well as regular review of competitive strategy.