List and describe the major functional areas of your company

Internal Paper

1. Company overview is not necessary this time. You can leave it out.

2. List and describe the major functional areas of your company; Raw Materials, R&D, Production/Manufacturing, Distribution, Sales etc. (Primary areas). Again for some of you, raw materials will be kind of short.  Iphones use electronic parts, plastics, rubber etc etc.  Can be sourced from many places.  For production, some of you have internet companies, so you are providing a service or offering.  That service has to be created by either programmers or solution experts.  R&D may be doing more analysis of how to bring the components of a service offering together.

3. Don’t forget the support areas areas as well.  HR, IT, Exec Mgmt. Legal, Procurement Finance, Accounting etc.

4.  For each functional area please give a description of the major processes that occur in each keeping in mind the 4 building blocks of competitive advantage where they may apply, Superior efficiency, superior quality, superior customer service, and superior innovation.  Not all 4 will apply in each category, the goal here is to use these building blocks, and key tangible/intangible resources to flush out issues relating to;

1. The creation of value/differentiation or 2.  reducing costs where they may apply to each functional area.

Now you don’t have to list building blocks in each functional area in your paper unless it really applies.  But instead use these items as tools to flush out potential issues.

There are other tools to use as well. You may want to use Strengths and Weaknesses from SWOT.  SW can be applied to internal more easily than Opportunities and Threats which are used to describe external factors.

At the end of the paper, please include in your conclusions a summary of what you feel is the Distinctive Competency of the company, and what are the potential issues.  You may want to read through your external paper to point you to issues that may be related to and give light to issues in the functional areas.  Please no recommendations yet in the internal analysis paper.  List your references

Hint:  start practicing with doing searches on the internet for functional areas within your company.  (ex.  Hershey and exec management issues), or (key raw materials for Hershey chocolate).  You may also want to refer to the company annual report. Take a look at Glassdoor for HR info and what it is like to work at the company.   Please list your key references.