Sustainable competitive advantage through resource allocations in operational strategies in housing business

Nowadays being competitive in the market place depends not only on the quality and price of product/service, but also on such criterion as company’s inner performance within resource allocation and leading operational strategy. Therefore this research is focused on the performance and resource-allocation analysis as well as defining of efficient operational strategy along with risk levels of the case company A, which operates in housing market. Moreover, this research tries to evaluate the performance of each department separately, based on which general picture of the case company can be concluded. The research is based on investigation of five departments of the Finnish case company. The main research method of collecting information is carried out with the help of Sense and Respond type of questionnaires, which were filled and returned by the participants of this research via email. Major results of the thesis are that most of all departments of the case company follow one common operational strategy, even though different deviations and problems based on resource-allocation exist in every department. In addition to that, departments’ performance along with risk levels should be improved in future period of time.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

How to apply sustainable competitive advantage for regional developments (Case: Ostrobothnia region of Finland)

Nowadays companies concern more about how to survive and extend their own business in future in their current marketplace. However, developing and prospering a region of the country is becoming more crucial question. Successful cooperation and partnership between different sectors of economy (for instance, between companies, public and academic sectors) leads to the flourishing and prosperity of the region and consequently of a country. European Commission established smart specialization platform, which is a strategic approach to economic development of a region. By defining and developing of vision, competitive advantages and strategic preferences, region will determine knowledge-based potential. The purpose of this paper is to assign and define the collaboration/relations existed, how strong these relations are and what the expectations are between 3 sectors of economy: public, academic and business. Area of carrying out this research is Ostrobothnia region, however, connections in other regions of Finland and internationally is also presented. There have been chosen 3industrial peaks from Ostrobothnia region: Energy, Fur and Boat industrial peaks. Analysis is conducted by implementing two core methods: Sense & Respond (S&R) and Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA). The goal of this research is also to use S&R method so as to allocate efficiently resources, and to define competitive priorities in cooperation. The main results show that the most tight collaboration and partnership is observed between companies and companies in all around Finland and internationally. While concerning other relationships, companies expect to have tighter cooperation especially in Ostrobothnia and other regions of Finland.© 2014 The author(s). The article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Study on resource allocations for sustainable competitive advantage

Today’s concern and problem for most of the companies is the way of surviving and prospering in current and future periods of time in the marketplace. Sustainable competitive ability can be one of the ways of adaptation to the global business and rapid environment requirements. Operational competitiveness is not easy to be sustainably improved because of unpredictable environment situations, such as continuous increasing customer needs, global competitive environment, rapid and unpredictable changes in government policy, company crisis during significant changes etc. However, it is possible to make adaptive adjustments on operations strategy level in dynamic business environment and to become competitive enough compared to the competitors. The purpose of this paper is to define and assess sustainable competitive advantage and the direction of development in housing business. It can be analysed by two core factors, i.e. Sense and Respond (S&R) methodology, Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) as well as Sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) method. This study also focuses on applying S&R method in order to optimize operational competitiveness as well as defining the competitive priorities of the case company. The analysis results show the critical areas in different departments of the case company, which can help the managers to make quick decisions. In addition, they reveal that during the crisis the resource allocation is continuously changing and therefore the operation strategy of the case company is not well defined as well as competitive advantages are not enough sustainable.© 2013 The author(s). The article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Sustainable competitive advantage (sca) analysis of furniture manufacturers in malaysia: normalized scaled critical factor index (NSCFI) approach

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Malaysian furniture industry via Sustainable competitive advantages (SCA) approach. In this case study, sense and respond method and Normalized Scaled Critical Factor Index (NSCFI) are used to specify the distribution of companies’ resources for different criteria and detect the attributes which are critical based on expectation and experience of companies’ employs. Moreover, this study evaluates Malaysian furniture business strategy according to manufacturing strategy in terms of an-alyzer, prospector and defender. Finally, SCA risk levels are presented to show how much company’s resource allocations support their business strategy. This case study involved four furniture manufacturing companies, in the southern part of Peninsular Malaysia to provide the overall view of their strategies in the perspective of knowledge & technology management, processes & work flows, organizational, and informa-tion systems. Hence, the findings of this study presented the preliminary results from these furniture companies in Malaysia, which are involved in sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) studies in terms of expectation and experience, NSCFI, operational strategy triangle of prospector (P), defender (D), and analyzer (A). The result shows that almost all fur-niture companies are categorized into the Analyzer type strategy and planning to remain being Analyzer in future to come