STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Strategic management refers to a continuous process of planning, decision making, implementing and evaluating for an organization according to the changing environment in order to achieve its objectives. The high level of dynamic nature of the external environment in today's era gives a call to strategic management on regular basis and hence making it an ongoing process. The term had been widely used in politics, economics and business. It is an art of planning in order to gain the optimal benefits out of what the current internal and external environment is offering.

But the question is what exactly strategy is? A strategy is always needed to be successful or win in a competition be it a market or in an event or on playing field. Strategy is about knowing yourself and leveraging your skills and competencies to deliver the best. A business strategy is all about analyzing organization's market, competitors moves and creating plans for better competitive moves and business approaches so as to grow, make profits and create value for its customers.

Example: IKEA

 IKEA Swedish Furniture giant when entered in Chine with almost the same strategy as it was following in European and north American markets failed initially. But soon it analyzed the market and altered its products, marketing strategy and even the target market and came up with a strategy to hold a better position in the Chinese market.

http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/how-ikea-adapted-its-strategies-to-expand-in-china/1/196322.html

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TARGET MARKET AND MARKET SEGMENTATION

      Target market is a small subset of the large population of the market you are present in. Not everyone in the market will be interested in your product. So why would you spend your time and money to tell about your products to them? And this is where the need for looking for an appropriate target audience/ target market comes. 

Target market is a subset of the larger set of population that may be interested in your product be it because of the similarity between their interest and the product you are offering, may be its because of their need and the ability of your product to fulfill the same. For example, an educational portal will have its target market as school students, college students, teachers, institutes, might be readers etc. Now here all these people are looking for some educational information and that is the Point of Parity. You are offering something which is of interest to them and hence they become their target market.

     Now once your target market is set, you need to step forward for something that is called market segmentation. Target market may be a subset of a large population but it itself is large enough with varying needs, requirements, desire, mentality, age, groups, region etc. and they all will be looking on for value with different perspectives. Market segmentation is the solution to this particular problem which divides your target market into further smaller groups on the basis of one of the factors like demographics, psycho-graphics or any other suitable factor. For example, in the above case the target audience can be segmented based on the field of education, interest. And hence segments can be formed such as IT, Engineering, Finance etc.  

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DEFINING OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Operations management is the science and art that deals with successful completions and delivery of goods and services to its end user.

It can also be defined as effective and efficient method for utilization of the resources available, in order to design and produce goods and services for customers.

Operations management is a very essential part of every organization be it manufacturing or service. But different organization calls it with different names but the aim of the activities remains efficiency and effectiveness.

Operation can be widely categorized into:

       1. Production of goods/ creating of services: It includes production of goods when talked in concern of manufacturing industries and creation of services when talked in concern of service providing industries. Ex: Farming, Mining, manufacturing, generating power, creating software, films, shows etc.

     2. Storage/Transportation:The goods once produced are either stored and maintained in warehouses or are transported in the form of trucking, mailing, moving, supplying etc.

     3. Exchange:This includes retailing, wholesaling, renting, stock exchanges etc.

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FINANCE

 Finance can be defined as the field that largely deals with the science of managing large volume of money associated with large business organizations and government bodies. The key aspect of finance is time value of money. The time value of money speaks about the changing power of a unit of currency and what it can buy for you over a period of time.

Finance can be categorized into three major subcategories:

      1.Personal Finance: The term personal finance is used in terms of an individual or a family which manages its finances in order to take care of their budget, savings, spending etc taking into considerations various risk factors and future events.

      2. Corporate Finance: All Financial activities that primarily deals with maximizing the value for the shareholders of a company through implementation of various short term and long term plans and strategies. Ex- Capital investment decisions, management of current liabilities and assets, inventory control, new capital purchases etc.

      

      3. Public Finance; The financial management dealing with the government expenditures and the ways of paying these expenses through borrowing and taxes.

Finance also provides a clear view of the actual price of the assets based on the risk associated with it and the expected rate of returns.

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