We Hear The Word Strategy

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

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Whenever we hear the word strategy we always end up with only one word in their minds, "plan". Strategic management is known as the process in which we determine the mission, vision, goals, values, roles, objectives, and responsibilities of the employee of present and future as well. Planning could be a management tool, period. Like any management tool, it's used for one purpose only: to assist a company to improved job - to focus its energy, to make sure that members of the organization are operating toward constant goals, to assess and alter the organization's direction in response to an ever-changing atmosphere. In short, strategic designing may be a disciplined effort to supply basic choices and actions that form and guide what a company is, what it will, and why it will it, with attention on the longer term. (Adapted from Bryson's Strategic designing publicly and noncommercial Organizations).

Now we will discuss the strategic management process of Australia Post, but first let’s have a brief view on the history of this prestigious organization. Over two hundred years of operation Australia Post have established a various - and one in all the most important - property and Postal portfolios in Australia. There sites vary from Post Offices, to mail process sites and warehouses, to offices and decision centers.

Their portfolio of in hand properties, most of them are classified as heritage properties and are enclosed within the Commonwealth Heritage List. These buildings date back the Colonial era, through post-Federation to post- WWII structures.

All of those buildings have social price in heritage terms, as they're valued by their native communities for the services they need provided within the past, moreover as for his or her look and subject qualities. Changing technologies have resulted in changes to the layout and style of Australia Post Business and organizational structure. In late 1800s they were the first who introduced telegraph offices semiconductor diode to extensions and alterations to several buildings. Similarly, changes in mail handling within and outside the post offices and also the construction of latest dedicated mail distribution facilities were some of the key achievements of Australia Post. Recently, they've opened retailers in major looking centers and created new large-format retail stores.

As a result of these trends several of their heritage properties aren't any longer appropriate to be used for communicating services however are set free on industrial terms to external businesses and organizations.

In 2010, following a comprehensive assessment, the Chairman of the Australian Heritage council congratulated U.S.A. on their exemplary management of the intensive heritage assets, and expressed that Australia Post had established a benchmark in distinguishing these heritage assets.

In next five years to Gregorian calendar month 2013, they are going to invest $10 million across the nation on their heritage portfolio, to supply specialist painting, maintenance and preservation works. Several of those buildings are custom-made to get its feasible ready for the local community.

Australia Post manages its property portfolio according to customer and business needs. They need to respond to changing customer demands, continue to maintain their Community Service Obligations, and act commercially which requires flexibility. It's one of the main reasons the portfolio consists of owned, leased and let sites.

When a Heritage-listed property is to be sold, the company engages external specialist heritage architects to establish a comprehensive Heritage Management Plan for the building. Ongoing adherence to this plan is included as a condition of sale (referenced in the contract of sale) and is enforceable by law. Finally, any such proposed sales must be approved by the Commonwealth Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, People and Communities.

Australia Post is the mail and parcel carrier for Australia. It’s a retail distribution network of licensed Post Offices (LPO) and Post outlets. With over twenty nine hundred LPO’s, it's Australia’s largest franchise network. There Post shops are a branded retail expertise with communication services, stationery, giftware, salutation cards, mobile phones and bill paying services. They’re one Post workplace business, not like LPO’s that typically are connected to alternative retail offers like newsagents, chemists and general stores. Australia Post includes a service obligation to supply communication services Australia wide, as well as remote and outback areas. The Post look provide has been well accepted by the overall client and therefore the overwhelming majority of Post look stores trade well.

The Australia Post’s LPO network may be a franchised network. This network is Australia’s largest franchised system, from massive and profitable metropolitan shops to tiny remote shops connected to a hostel. The larger LPO’s are extremely wanted within the business sales marketplace. They’re thought of low risk, provide monopoly merchandise, have short gap hours and are thought of to be "white collar". As a result, these shops command terribly high goodwill.

Australia Post, through its expertise with the LPO network, understands that a competent franchisee can offer the next level of service than an organization operation and thus is seeking to franchise its Post look network. It conjointly needs to be told from its expertise with the LPO network and build a well completely different Post look Franchise culture.

To know about the current strategy of the company we started of with their mission and Vision statements. The vision of Australia Post says that "they are committed to providing high-quality mail and parcel services to all Australians and their enthusiastic, professional people will build a progressive commercial corporation through a commitment to high levels of customer satisfaction".

Same as the mission statement says that Australia Post will meet their customers’ changing needs by providing:

•innovative and easy-to-use products and services;

•friendly service by knowledgeable staff;

•consistent on-time delivery;

•value for money; and

•modern, efficient networks.

According to the Australia Post current strategy they are heavenly investing on their work force to get a diverse, engaged, inclusive and capable workforce. Australia Post’s workforce is formed from 33,031 employees and some ten thousand licensees, franchisees and mail contractors. They have a spread of policies supporting the culture and behaviors in their geographical point, together with their ethics, equal employment chance and variety policies, and their truthful Work Agreement.

Their moral standards are contained within the policy document of their ethics: The manner they have a tendency to do things at Australia Post. However, Australia Post conducts their business with integrity, honesty and fairness and in compliance with all relevant laws, rules, codes and social standards.

Their four culture pillars – safety, client focus, responsibility and speed of action – produce the inspiration for how they have a tendency to do things at Australia Post. Embedding these behaviors across the enterprise is vital to executing their strategic priorities. In 2011–12 the company’s main focus shifted from building awareness and understanding of the culture pillars to embedding them into their core systems, processes and programs of labor.

The highest priority for their individuals is to confirm a secure operating atmosphere. As their journey towards a geographical point with zero injuries, zero damage and nil tolerance of unsafe acts continues, Australia Post have developed variety of programs to support this goal.

Safety Time sessions continuing to boost awareness and involve staff across the enterprise in safety discussions. This enhances national initiatives geared towards cultural amendment and supports a spread of specific programs addressing hazards relevant to totally different business units.

Australia Post enforced their enterprise wide "Stop think Do" campaign that concerned each team across the business, from stores to distribution centers and company offices , taking time to prevent work and discuss concepts that might cut back hazards and risk of injury.

"Stop think Do" resulted in lists of actions denote in high visibility areas in each geographical point. The actions were the result of every team discussion. Examples of common topics mentioned, embody manual handling of huge and serious parcels, hazards around slips and journeys and area or storage constraints.

Another program introduced this year was "motor vehicle Pilot", a security initiative that aims to develop acceptable behaviors to inform their work force to stay aware of hazards once acting acquainted jobs or tasks.

Australia Post recognizes that the activity amendment takes time. Their safety performance this year reflects their journey and demonstrates that we have a tendency to still have some way to travel during this critically necessary space. This year, we have a tendency to achieved associate improvement in their incident rate, recording a pair of 2.5 incidents (per a hundred full‑time employees) against their target of 2.6. This can be down 21% on last year’s result. However, their Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) of 11.5 (up from 10.3 last year) is unsatisfactory and needs continuing focus.

As the businesses are adapting new technologies to have a perfect edge over there competition, so the Australia Post is heading on its way too. Australia Post are going to do an investment of $2 billion into modernizing parcel delivery, rising retail networks and launching a brand new digital mailbox in an endeavor to future-proof the business and reap the advantages of the digital economy. This will be the only largest investment within the history of Australia Post and it comes on the rear of the increasing quality of on-line searching that has raised the demand for package delivery to an incomparable high limit.

Last year, native customers spent a complete of $11.9bn in on-line retail sales, inflicting Australia Post to systematically operate at peak levels over the twelve months, instead of simply throughout vacation periods. This successively place increasing pressure on each delivery operations and retail stores themselves, making a requirement that the corporate struggled to fulfill.

While the increasing preference to buy on-line did see Australia Post usher in a profit of $546m from their unregistered sector of mail and specific deliveries last year, the corporate has decided that they have to digitize their current operations if they need to stay relevant and therefore the "cornerstone of the community". As the CEO emphases the importance of this investment by saying:

"We recognize that the demand for physical mail services will continue to decrease and while our parcels business is growing, increased competition and the fixed costs associated with maintaining our national mail network will challenge our ability to continue to grow and invest in the future.

Over the next four years, this investment will ensure that Australian consumers and businesses have real choice and convenience in parcel delivery, thanks to improved automation and tracking technology. Continued investment in 24/7 parcel lockers and retail superstores will also mean that by 2014, 80% of Australians in metropolitan areas will be within 10 minutes drive of an after-hours parcel collection location."

So here the question is "will this investment be a strong step towards future sustainability? The idea of hosting all of your vital details on-line is appealing, however what regarding security issues? solely last week did a computer bug expose the names and locations of thousands of Australians who had been sent parcels, forcing Australia Post to clean up its electronic parcel trailing service. And, this was solely a period of time when the post was created to suspend its "click & send" service that's used for on-line looking when the names and addresses of shoppers were exposed through manipulations of the web site address.

Granted, ancient mail is not any more liable to security breaches - snail-mail are often intercepted by anyone throughout its delivery cycle - thus, in such a security aware world, can Australians see the concept of the Digital Mailbox, that encourages you to transfer copies of vital documents like tax receipts and passport scans, too risky?

It is clear that Australia Post needed to look to the future, as make sure that services they were offering were relevant and digitized. But given that the services do not offer much more than existing services, such as BPay and POSTbillpay, it seems only time will tell whether this is a technology-driven function that the Australian public truly wants. What they really need to do is diversify their portfolio by offering more convenience to the community like by offering services like money orders, greeting cards, stationary etc. if we do a market analysis and see what type of trends we have seen in the market we can easily came across the following points.

Australia post 2004 profit is $462million a 11.6% increase. This is 32% increase since 1998. Approx 4% per year excluding 2004.but in 2009 there was dramatic downfall in the company finances.

Post is proving to place workers under the retail awarded resulting in an approx.30% decrease, which shows that Post is combating it’s high proportion of labor cost

A dramatic shift was being made from full time employees to casual workers

Post proposed a 5c increase on mail services in 2002 but expand general mail to cover 0-125g parcels which would now include 50g-125g as general mail yet minimizing the max mail thickness from 10mm to 5mm. This proposal was rejected as it was identified that the bulk of all general mail were advertising flyers & greeting cards & would bring little benefit to consumers with a reduced max thickness.

From year 1997 up till now most the Revenue is generated from mail delivery service.

For a deregulated market Post might not be ready to keep this figure because it would be open to competition from new competitors that will have less operative prices by operative with lower standards.

If the company wants to invest in other options let’s see the viability of the options by considering Potter’s five forces analysis.

Business Sectors

Threat of entrance

Threat of substitutes

Power of suppliers

Power of Buyers

Score

importance

Total score

General mail

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Express mail

1

3

1

3

9

2

18

Giro Post

2

2

1

2

8

2

16

Greeting cards

2

3

1

2

12

2

24

Packaging service

2

2

1

2

8

2

16

Collectables

3

3

2

3

54

3

162

Stationary

1

1

1

3

3

1

3

Banking service

2

3

1

2

12

1

12

Bill payments

1

3

1

1

3

3

9

Money orders

2

9

1

2

12

2

24

Passport services

3

3

3

2

24

2

108

Risk rating

High= 3

Med=2

Low=1

Importance rating

High= 3

Med=2

Low=1

The industry analysis clearly shows that the Express Mail though encompasses a high potential for substitutes isn't probably to get abundant threat as competition is already terribly high during this sector with seventy established corporations operational in the region. While Banking and cash orders are comparatively safe as they'd need high revenue to setup within the industry & have already serious competition. All of them provide constant service

Looking on the Card Sales services may be a terribly extremely competitive space that's roaring to Post due to the high exposure that postage services creates to direct customers. A deregulated market would have a little result on this sector of the business. Where Passport Interviews may be a high threat for brand new entrants and substitutes if picture stores were eligible to conduct interviews patrons can need to chance to form a 1 look stop.

Our recommendations in this case will be that they should try to offer something extra then just Banking and money order post. Collectable points will be a good idea or lessen down there services cost by offering services bundles to attract some market share. The Australia post already got its monopoly in Passport services. To maintain that they should look into options of one stop/ one window operations to facilitate huge chunk of customers and thus increasing the barrier to new threats as well. To ensure that the market share of Express mails remains there they have to improve the quality of their mail delivery performance by adapting better supply chain management systems.

The current strategy that Australia Post follow is very effective in the since that it can value a long term sustainable advantage for them but how long it will be backing them?, well we can’t say about that. Investing billions of money to just upgrade their digital mailing system is more of a risk rather than an investment to gain profit as glitches have been observed beforehand. What they actually need is to focus ahead and thinking about investing in other services that shows future potential as well.

There many business opportunities that are waiting for them which can be beneficial for the future like merger with a giant air service like Virgin blue and get the cost benifits of air deliveries. They can advertise a lot in the media that profits generated by Post are uplifting the Australian economy to attract other customer as well as investors. As they already did an amazing job with the automation of the services they should try to extend automation as achieved within the authority distribution center by Standardization of the more effective processes.

As Australia post systems are one of the best mailing systems of the world, Post ought to consult to alternative countries with regulated postage systems and have partnerships with other postal services to have an efficient value delivery network. A partnership with Tatterstalls can supply future innovation to one stop shop service and thus gives a good chance to increase their revenue. Another good practice is that they should be in the contact of the 800,000 client base they have by providing them info regarding their offers and services via email or SMS, so that the customer remains in the loop.

Well there is a room for improvement and can make the company more efficient in terms of finances, revenue as well as service delivery too. All they have to do is working on present by having their focus on future. All of the above recommendations need a huge amount of capital plus dedication, which results can only be seen in the long run in terms of market share and profits. Just forget the past, learn from the mistakes and get to the future as Collin Powell said:

"Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror."