Principles of Strategic Management of Adobe - Case Study Example

Adobe corporate resources Adobe is a multinational company that provides digital marketing tools across the world providing companies with a platform to market digital substances, to incorporate them across the media devices and to analyze their progress over time. Their objective circles around the 4 M realm, helping customers ‘make, manage, measure and monetize’ their commodities. This helps it make a large customer base across the globe while also making it a renowned company in marketing industry across the globe. Having an international company the size of Adobe requires well defined strategic management skills. The company has a well defined corporate strategic management base employing some of the best skills circling basic the realms of corporate resources. This paper purports to explore the basic concepts that Adobe utilizes through marketing, financial strategies, Research and Development, Human Resource Management, Information Technology and Operation and Logistics, evaluating which of them is most competent to the business and how they are relevant to the future of the business. It also looks into the viable internal factors that management can outsource to other companies, while looking at the future of the business and its ability to remain relevant in a diversifying and competing business environment (Morden, 398). Research and Development As a research driven company, Adobe researchers strive to remain on their toes in order to remain relevant in the ever changing information technology world. Researchers ensure to create the best innovations for clients. To make this doable, the company employs passionate individuals, who remain committed leaders and trustworthy to the creativity process. The company ensures that the innovators get the support they need and gives them the freedom to roam around their ideas. Additionally, the company holds collaborative projects with other companies as well as universities. The universities’ Information Technology Faculties are important because in order to advance to the future, technological advancement is core especially in the Information Systems and Technology techniques, which is the main focus of Adobe Company. Adobe’s inter-faculty relationship strategies between IT and engineering in collaborating universities make the research and development practice sharp edged. Consequently, the company provides some of the best software in the market like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5. It also invests heavily in employing PhD researchers who provide radical innovations for the company’s customers. There are two main forms attached to technological discontinuity; competency destroying and competency enhancing. In Adobe, both forms are in use because the company uses both old technologies to improve prior innovations, while also enhancing competency in order to allow for new innovations that will boost the creation of new technologies. Adobe employs substantial amounts of money to research and development. The company has spent $209.53 million in the first quarter of 2014 on R&D. This figure has double as compared to the last four years. This gives the company an upper hand in customer product satisfaction as compared to other company’s commitment to R&D. The company makes R&D adjustments to all 12 sites globally through individualization of each territory’s offices. Each site conducts their own R&D under the oversight of the international offices in the United States. Adobe has made realizable efforts towards environmental sustainability. The company’s R&D made projections of achievement of NetZero standards energy consumption by the year 2015 for their United States facilities. In addition, the company promises reduction of packaging per product by 80% by year end 2014. The company was able to make prior product packaging reduction promises of 40% by 2012. The role of the research and development manager is to enhance the department’s primary function of securing product lifecycle. Marketing Adobe incorporates a range of marketing skills to enable venture into new markets as well as establish their already large international market. The company has opened many branches across the world to cater to their clientele needs. They have 12 branches worldwide, allowing for easy access to suit customer requirements globally. This is in line with their mission “delivering powerful graphic design, publishing and imaging software for print, web, and video production”, and their corporate objective of being the leading information technology software provider in the world (Ansoff, 178). Adobe’s market mix provides for good base to enhance relevance in the market. Assessing their four P’s market mix components reveals their inclusion of product enhancement through numerous production of creative software, offering them at cheap prices which one can download freely from the Web. Additionally, the corporation offers promotions through coupons, free trials and discounts on products. Such is the 40% discount off limited periods on the FrameMaker 12. International market mix consists of place marketing, where they have opened twelve international Adobe offices in destined places with easy access to large populations such as in India, United States, South Africa, and Australia among others. Their offices spread through all continents. While Adobe spends over 80,000 hours annually developing their performance management strategies, marketing takes up about 40% on new employees, most of who are in North America. This trend shows continual improvement in the company’s growth with employee turn out being 11,000 personnel. Adobe moved from traditional systems of management five years ago, introducing better collaborative and teamwork strategies. This system proved simpler, yet incredibly effective for the company. Companies and individuals have better marketing platforms when they collaborate with Adobe. The company’s endowment makes it vastly trusted and elaborate to new and existing clients. The work of the marketing managers is to ensure products remain in the market for long periods, ensuring long life cycles. They should also have relevant market segmentation skills to point out the strongholds of the company’s products. They also conduct market research for the clients’ products to help them endure in the market. Adobe provides this platform for innovations and existing products for clients, applying different strategies for each country preferences. Human Resource Management The human resource management of adobe strives to encourage the innovation of products of the employees and improve on them through creation of favorable work environment. This is achievable through a concise statement of the various duties and obligations and encouraging teamwork between the various employees of the corporation. This helps in the realization of the company’s mission of producing state of the art software that surpasses competitive businesses. With the introduction of reinforced development of opportunities and abilities, the corporation was able to foster better structures, strategies, beliefs, values and processes. This saw the improvement of performance at Adobe through an increased workforce from 7,564 employees in 2004 to 11,000 in 2014. This places it at a better stance against its competitors since it can produce more products to satisfy more customers. This technique helps the company encourage team spirit between the employees. This is achievable because some people have more than one boss, as is in bureaucratic organizations that instills authority and fear. Teamwork places the company at a better position since the employees are able to share ideas, thus giving room for better innovations and placing them at an advantage over their competitors. Adobe employs certain techniques to foster their production through the human resource management systems. Departmental performance and product viability align employee appraisal. Employees who perform exemplarily well in their tasks and responsibilities receive incentives to reflect their performance. In the long run, this improves performance. Workers also have to go through immense training on inception into the organization, receiving proper training on the proceedings of the company. They receive up to date job description in order to avoid time wastage. Adobe keeps an interactive relationship with many unions and institutions. For instance, they make collaborative agreements with universities, for instance, to tutor, train and recruit innovative ideas from these institutions. They also extensively offer employment to PhD students and try to help in help them in continuing their innovative projects, facilitating them into gaining the realization of their dues. They also ensure to promote teaming between employees. Teaming creates an environment of not just gaining knowledge but also gives a chance to teaching and imminent perfection. With offices around the world, they can make adjustments in different countries’ cultures since this allows better entry into the market and leads to better understanding of the workforce. Outsourcing in human resource management is important to corporations since it helps in reducing costs, saving time and mostly produces better goods and services. The role of the human resource manager is maintaining efficiency through ensuring a productive workforce for the corporation. It also aids in finding the best course of action for corporations to take when it comes to getting things done. Human resource managers should ensure utmost effectiveness stands throughout the lifecycle of a company. Information Technology The underlying concept of IT systems at Adobe is that they strive to become the best in the world. It is primarily stimulated by commitment to innovators’ ideas while enduring into competitive IT standards. The company boosts an assortment of collection of available software which is available to customers. The company has world class IT systems that are largely accessible and tremendous applause evidently from their explored commitment in delivering high tech product for the consumer. This goes in line with ensuring the high standards attributed to the corporation and their commitment to the mission in being a leading corporation in provision of software to the public. Adobe built on early success especially with innovative professionals through delivery of a broad base of digital designs essential to creation and publication of content in print and faster on Web, with ease, and more efficiency. The Adobe databases are user friendly and interactive, both for the customer as well as for the employees. This allows them to enjoy more clients since people will prefer non complex sites. They save more time and reduce redundancy and frustrations. These improvements and incorporations make Adobe a favorite for many people. This ensures that Adobe enjoys the market size and also continuity from forthcoming clients. Adobe has a well defined information technology department that aids it compete with other business in providing firewalls and securities in an effort to secure the well being of their customers. Adobe also ensures that the sources they expose their customers also get protection for every entry they make into the company database. Adobe ensures to keep strict content on the site and also has firewall to stop unprecedented users from accessing the database information. The corporation however, faces some drawbacks when it comes to access into some countries. This places the company through some hurdles and particularly gives it difficult when trying to venture into some countries. IT sometimes plays creates hindrances for Adobe as some sites are sometimes blocked by the servers due top political or legal systems. This may create competition for the company as it cannot deal with the competition with markets from these regions. The basic responsibilities of an IT manager are to develop and monitor financial organization conditions and to coordinate information between departments in an organization. They should also maintain constant accessibility of systems for the clients through the Web databases. Citations Ansoff, Igor, “Strategic management”, Palgrave Macmillan, NJ, 2007. Pg 178 Morden, Tony, “Principles of Strategic Management Innovative Business Textbooks”, Ashgate Publishing, Reading. Pg 398 Read More