1. Identify firm’s resources and capabilities
Key resources
Diversity
Alcatel-Lucent pays a lot of attention to tolerating and respecting their employees and also encourages this attitude between their employees. Variety in cultures is focused for improving teamwork and outputs. Furthermore, the firm wants to achieve a global perspective by adapting this. Their focus on diversity improves employees’ motivation and skills. Personal and career development, working environment, compensation and benefits Alcatel-Lucent also emphasizes employee skills and training by giving employees regular assignments, offering a personalized professional development plan, and supporting a variety of career tracks. The firm has its own Alcatel-Lucent University and e-learning portal. The positive working environment is demonstrated by a work/life balance including, for instance, flexible working arrangements, by multicultural richness and by high-tech communications. Alcatel-Lucent has a competitive compensation package in place with a bonus plan and long-term salary policy including stock options and share purchase plans. These incentives enhance employee motivation highly. Mobility
Alcatel-Lucent offers mobility across borders on a geographical, organizational or functional basis. This improves employee motivation and skills by opening opportunities for self-actualization, for instance. Furthermore, it drives diversity and teamwork, and also expresses the firm’s international culture. Technologies (patents)
The Essay on The Alcatel-Lucent merger
1. Referring to the case and this chapter, discuss what conditions and negotiation factors pushed forth the merger in 2006 and were not present in 2001. Negotiation describes the process of discussion by which two or more parties aim to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. It comprises of five stages: preparation, relationship building, the exchange of task related information, persuasion and ...
Innovation has always been one of the main drivers of Alcatel Lucent. Indeed, as the financial health was going risky, the company kept on investing in Research and development. In 2011, 15,2% of the turnover were dedicated to R&D and more than 2600 patents were obtained. From 2007 around 2 billion Euros were invested in R&D each year (challenges magazine January 2013).
Moreover, 7physics Nobel prices have been attributed to Alcatel scientists, which indicates the increasing performance of the company regarding innovation Values
Alcatel has put a point of honor to keep on improving its products in order to provide the best solution to their customers. The main values are respect, responsibility and innovation. Alcatel and its employees are committed to provide the best of themselves in order to maximize customer satisfaction and build trust. Finance
In 2011, the net debt of the company is 31 million euro and it becomes 2.7 billion euros in 2013, so there’s severe problem with the capital liquidity and cash flow, the company need to take a look at this and try to improve its financial situation. Physical resources
The company has abundant resource of real estate. It owns two types of sites: the production and assembly sites and research and innovation site. The company evaluate the properties are in good condition and meet the needs and requirements of the Group’s current and future activity. Therefore, we can see the company has a strengthen with its large amount of subsidiaries and thus contribute to sufficient capacity at the moment.
Capabilities
R&D: It seems like R&D is a major capability at A.L. This tradition of developing innovative products goes back to the 19th century with the invention of the Telephone by Bell. Since then, Bell Labs (which are part of AL) have invented the transistor and have kept on coming up with innovations. Evidence of this can be seen with 2100 patents being deposited in 2009 alone. Engineering: AL has shown strong capabilities in engineering. For instance, 2 researchers at AL (Boyle and Smith) received a Nobel price for their work on charge-coupled devices. This device is now used in digital cameras and astronomy.
Innovation: AL has been seen as a strongly innovative company. Evidence of this can be seen by their ranking in the MIT Technology Reviews’s 2012 Top 50 list of the “World’s Most Innovative Companies”. Global Sales and Marketing: The company has merged the sales and marketing department to serve customers with a consistent top quality service around the world. This global vision to address this customer needs has been a real success story. global customer Delivery: The organization has a real expertise in customer delivery thanks to the Global Customer Delivery Organization. This organization is able to adapt and respond to customer’s expectations based on a “Precision Delivery” vision. Mergers & Acquisitions: AL has been successful with M&A acquisitions in different companies. For instance AL acquired in 2007 Net Devices, Tropic Networks, Thomson Advisory Group and Motive, Inc.
The Term Paper on Ford Motor Company Customer Services Credit
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2. Linkages between resources and capabilities
Within the capabilities there are strong links between R&D, innovation and engineering. Innovation is then linked to the technologies in terms or resources. R&D is linked to financial resources as a large amount of capital is spent on that capability. Personal and career development, working environment and compensation have strong links to all capability dimensions as those resources enable successful working results. Furthermore, diversity links well to global sales and global customer delivery. Mobility also enables the global aspects of Alcatel-Lucent’s capabilities. All in all, there are some strong linkages in the firm’s resources and capabilities.
Develop Strategy Implications
Exploring Key strengths: We identified that key strengths are innovation and R&D. Perhaps one idea would be to develop new, sophisticated, differentiated products. These products would thus be harder to copy. Also, they would provide higher value for customers, much like German companies such as Stilh. They should use their diversity and mobility to cut their production costs. Indeed, much of their production plants are in countries where cost of production is high. Hence, the company could relocate its production plants in countries where cost of production is cheaper. The customer commitment should be used to continue building a loyalty among present customers.
The Essay on The Jungle 2 Production Of Food Products
It was the early 1900 s and industrial development was booming. The Immigrated population was expanding exponentially because people from a variety of foreign countries were migrating to America. Many settled in and around the areas of Chicago. Immigrants faced intense hardships as newcomers to the country but eventually found work because they accepted little pay. The sanitation conditions, ...
Managing Key weaknesses: One of the strong identified weaknesses is the oversized labor force. In order to become competitive once more, the company should reduce the number of staff and remove the unprofitable areas of the company. It can be argued that although they have a rich, diversified portfolio, this has not enabled them to reach profitability. Thus downsizing their portfolio and staff would enable them to focus on profitable areas.
Superfluous strengths: The company appears to have many kinds of applications and products in different areas (mobile, wireless, hardware, etc).
This is a strength however has perhaps not been used to its full capacity. A good strategy would be to bundle together the products and portfolios such as to make them interconnected and sell them as packages. Also, the company is global but appears to be focused mainly on the US. A good strategy would to put more weight in its efforts in other areas such as the Asia Pacific region.