Company offering digital audio book services to the King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia - Coursework Example

?Executive Summary Company will be offering digital audio book services to the King Abdul Aziz in Saudi Arabia. operates under the control of government and is one of the leading universities in the region. University has a large library and is willing to digitalize the books in order to reduce the costs as well as the storage capacity. Our firm will therefore offer the services of digitalizing the books and will deliver the same through a website based services to students of the university. Company Details This company will be a joint venture between our company and the University of King Abdul Aziz in Saudi Arabia. Company will operate as a joint venture with the university in order to develop audio-book services for the students of the university. The overall aim of the firm is to persuade the universities to build a long term relationship with our firms so that the cost effective services can be offered to them. Further, firm also intends to develop a brand image which can persuade students to purchase our low cost books in place of traditional paper based books for study purposes. We are a new firm with the very limited resources and will be operating as a partnership firm. The firm will be engaged into the business of developing digital products for the educational institutions in order to help them to lower the costs for their students. There will be three partners involved in the overall ownership and organization of the firm. Each partner will be contributing capital as well as the manpower to the organization in order to help the firm to grow and expand. Our basic product will be to offer audio and digital books for the students of the universities specially for the students from the developed and developing countries. The overall aim is to basically lower the cost of books for the students as students have to buy expensive books. The traditional library sources can held limited copies of each book and as such storing and shelving the books costs money to the universities. In order to increase the overall choices for the students and allow universities to increase the number of copies to be made available to the students, we will be offering products which can allow the students to lower the overall cost of study. Thus the aim of this firm is to lower the cost of study through effective e-commerce solutions.( Epstein, 2004) It is also important to note that our mission statement is focused upon developing technologies which can help to transform conventional paper based books to audio ebooks to make learning easy for the students. The digitalization of the books therefore will allow the students to easily get as many copies of the books as they want and can use them in a relatively easier and different manner. Organizational Structure There will be four departments within the firm with one CEO controlling the overall affairs of the organization. Following departments will be directly reporting to CEO: 1. Production 2. Finance 3. Innovations 4. Legal department There will also be a market manager who will also be directly reporting to the CEO of the firm. Overall the structure will be centralized with CEO controlling most of the affairs of the firm. King Abdul Aziz University King Abdul Aziz University is one of the leading universities in Saudi Arabia and has flourished over the period of time. Founded in 1967 under the private ownership, university was overtaken by Government of Saudi Arabia. University now operates under the control of Ministry of Higher education of Saudi Arabia and gets it funding from government to finance its activities.1 One of the key requirements for the university is to have a well-established library to allow its students to have an access to the latest books and other material for study and research purposes. Over the period of time, universities from developed countries have made the efforts to digitalize their books in order to increase their portability as well as availability. Delivered through internet, these audio e-books allow students to get multiple copies of the books and use them with ease according to their own convenience. King Abdul Aziz University has also taken initiatives to transform its books into the online and audio books to increase their availability for the students. Product and Services The major product to be offered is the text audio e-book transferred from the traditional paper based book. The product will be tailor made for the King Abdul Aziz University as our firm will be converting the traditional hard bound books of the university into digital formats. This type of product is neither available in University nor it is being used by any other educational institution within Saudi Arabia. The overall process of the product development will take place in different stages i.e. at the first stage, the copyrights of the books will be acquired. In order to achieve this objective, our firm is in constant negotiation with the university to deal with the professors holding the copyrights of the books. This relationship with the university therefore provides us a competitive advantage over others as the university is helping our firm to obtain copyrights easily. At the second phase, the overall digitalization process will start wherein the books will be converted into audio formats. In order to achieve this, firm has already assessed the human resource requirements. In order to accomplish this, 3 IT engineers will be hired from IBM whereas 10 other workers will also be employed in order to start the overall process of digitalizing the books. In all, almost 973 books will be transferred to the digital format at the university. Once the digitalization process ends, the books will be uploaded to the site where the students will be provided login details to download and use the books. Business Strategy of the firm Based upon the above model of operations, we aim to expand into different markets and to different universities within the period of three years. During the first year of the operations of the firm, firm will negotiate with the universities and sign contracts with them. Once this phase is over, next phase will involve the development of website which will link with the university and the overall process of transferring the books to the digital formats will start. The next phase will involve dealing with the issues of copyrights and other problems and once it’s over, the system will be made live and its maintenance will be started. The second and third year of the business will however, focus further on the advertisement and marketing of our services. This will therefore further be extended to other universities to assist them in digitalizing their books to lower the overall costs for their students to buy the books. Consumers There will be two major segments of consumers who will be served by our firm through our services. The first group, as discussed above, will comprise of universities whereas the second group will be based upon the university students. Both types of consumers will be benefiting from the reduction in the cost to be obtained as a result of using our services. Universities will not only benefit by reducing the costs but will also be able to reduce the shelf space and offer more customized and flexible services to their students. University students too will be able to reduce their overall cost of study while at the same time experiencing new way of learning through digital books. In this phase, the primary focus will be on King Abdul Aziz University Saudi Arabia and students studying at various campuses and faculties of the university. Overall market segmentation of the students suggest that there will be two groups of students i.e. the one who like to enjoy audio-books because of low cost and the one who don’t like to use such books. As such the overall focus of the firm will be on targeting customers willing to avail the low cost audio books. Almost 3700 new students get enrollment in the university and with an overall expenditure of ?20 per student, the total annual expenditure will be around ?254000 per year. Key Performance and success factors In order to accomplish the above business strategy and to obtain the strategic objectives of the business, following key performance and success factors will be important: 1. Relationship with the universities will be one of the key variables as the direct consumers of the firms. Our focus will be on developing long lasting relationships with the universities to pursue them to convert their books to digital formats. 2. Access to copyrights of the books so that they can be converted without going into any legal disputes. 3. Seamless technology which can allow the efficient access and transfer of digital books. These success factors will define as to how the firm will be able to succeed in the market. Cost As discussed above, there will be three IT engineers required to complete the development process for the websites and setting up other technological requirements. Firm will also hire extra 20 workers in order to expedite the overall process of converting the books to the digital formats. Apart from this, firm will also incur the cost of renting the premises to run the operations. Further, capital expenditure will be made on the development of systems and other infrastructure for smooth operations of the firm. Firm also intends to spend on the public relations. Overall cost will be around ?380,000 per year. Convenience The overall benefit of using our services will be the convenience offered to both the university as well as the students. Students will be able to get easy access from the university website to log on to the system to download and read the books online. It will therefore not only save the time but the cost also. Communication In order to accomplish the overall business strategy, firm intends to communicate at three different levels. Since University works under the government therefore firm will communicate first with the government and pursue them to provide necessary funding to the university. Firm will also negotiate with the university to obtain copyrights for the books besides providing other resources to convert the books to the digital format. Finally, the firm will also be communicating with the students to help them recognize as to how this new technology can help them to improve their overall study experience. (Whiteley, 2001) SWOT Analysis Strengths 1. Relative technical advantage as no one in the region is either offering or using these services. 2. Good relationships with the university will allow smoother operations of the firm. 3. Our strength in offering value to the customers will allow us to beat the competition. Weaknesses 1. Probably one of the key weaknesses is the ease with which the overall business model can be copied and utilized. 2. Limited resources of the firm may not allow it to continue to expand its information technology infrastructure. Opportunities 1. Government support can open more avenues for digitalizing books for other universities also. 2. The market is relatively untapped and universities are not commercially competing with each other. Such blank market therefore will allow the firm to look into such segment of the market which can offer less costly alternative to compete. 3. Middle East Market is one of the growing markets with more focus on delivering quality education. Since the countries are oil rich therefore governments have the financing to open and manage universities on the modern lines. Threats 1. Other larger competitors such as Google and Amazon can capture the market. 2. Copyright issues can also pose significant threats. Exit Strategy Considering the overall business strategy and potential, the firm intends to get its money back as quickly as possible. Since the overalls scope of the work is relatively limited therefore it is important to understand that the firm may have to make an early exit from the market. This could also be due to the fact that competitors like Amazon and Google can also enter the market. Considering the future market requirements and dynamics, it might be assumed that the firm might opt for the sale of the company. Firms like Google or Amazon may acquire us once we develop our market base within the region. A firm level sale will allow the investors to get relatively higher value for their investment as the firm will only opt for sale once it has been able to establish itself in the region. References Whiteley, D. (2001) E-Commerce: Strategy, Technologies And Applications, New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Book O’Donnell, M. (1991) Writing Business Plans That Get Results, New York: McGraw-Hill. Epstein, M. (2004) Implementing ecommerce strategies, New York: Greenwood Publishing Group,. 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