Company Competitiveness Case Study

1.3 The concept of a company’s competitiveness

Competitiveness originated from the Latin word, ‘competer’, which means involvement in a business rivalry for markets. It has become common to describe economic strength of an entity with respect to its competitors in the global market economy in which goods, services, people, skills, and ideas move freely across geographical borders (Murtha, 1998). Company level competitiveness can be defined as the ability of a company to design, produce and or market products superior to those offered by competitors, considering the price and non-price qualities (D'Cruz & Rugman, 1992). Competitiveness processes are those processes, which help identify the importance and current performance of core processes

It is only logical, because a company's competitiveness is affected not only by the specific factors, but also by the combination of these factors, which further depend on many other factors. Therefore as is known, the know-how having brought success to some company might not be that useful to other companies due to various additional influential aspects. The following are some of the factors that influence a company’s competitiveness.

Quality of human resources and usage efficiency

This is one of the most substantial factors in building competitiveness of any company. Competitiveness of business depends directly on productivity, motivation and loyalty of employees available to an enterprise. Generating of new ideas often coming also from the companies’ employees is one of the factors improving business competitiveness through providing of innovations (Subramaniam & Youndt, 2005). Similarly, skills of employees in rendering high quality service to clients, and ability to sell products or services have direct effect on financial performance of the company

Business

Strategic management can be defined as “the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of managerial actions that enhance the value of a business enterprise” (Teece, 1990). “Strategic management is a process that deals with the entrepreneurial work of the organization, with organizational renewal and growth, and, more particularly, with developing and utilizing the strategy which is to guide the organization’s operations” (Schendel & Hofer, 1979). The fundamental idea of any strategic management system is to anticipate, recognize, evaluate, resolve, control, document, and learn from past experiences in ways that support the overall viability of the project. “Strategic management is that set of managerial decisions and actions that determines the long-run performance of a corporation. It includes environmental scanning (both external and internal), strategy formulation, strategy implementation and evaluation and control” (Thomas, Hunger, & Rangarajan, 2008) Importance of strategic management in construction industry is validated by its requirement for better performance. Strategic management asks questions of the future. What are the forces driving change in the marketplace? What are the new competencies we will need to meet them? How will we have