CASE STUDY REPORT: SAUDI ARAMCO

CASE STUDY REPORT: SAUDI ARAMCO
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Contents
Question one 2
Question two 4
Question three 6
Question four 8
References 11
Q1: The process of strategic management: Rational (or formal) model
Answer: The Rational (or formal) model of the process of strategic management has six stages in total where the second stage, strategic analysis, contains four steps. The six stages are, identifying strategic objectives, strategic analysis, strategic direction setting, strategic choice, strategic implementation and strategic evaluation.
The model starts with identifying the current vision, mission and strategic objectives of the organization. For a new company, identifying and determining new objectives is the starting point; but for an existing business organization, the starting point is identifying current objectives. Based on the company and type of company, the objectives can be determined every year. However, for most large and moderate scale business organizations, it takes more than one year to implement strategies and get result from them. Identifying the challenges as well as learning their importance is very beneficial before moving towards establishing strategies. This includes the process of identifying or recognizing the key variables (deWit and Meyer, 2010).
It is very crucial to find out the causes for any failure to reach the goal in the existing objectives or operational process. Once the objectives are determined, they need to be analyzed. Theoretically, there have been several methods for strategic analysis, like SWOT analysis which determines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the company to analyze and identify future potential of the company in compare with the current situation. In addition to this, the analysts need to consider environmental factors due to operating process and current resources of the organization. Environmental factors have grown great concern in recent decades around the world and they are even more important for a manufacturing company like Saudi Aramco. Analyzing the resources of the organization will help to determine its future course of action.
The analysis determines the future strategic direction for the company which includes setting new vision, mission and strategic objectives. If current objectives are capable of gaining expected profit, it might be a good idea not changes them entirely. Instead, some new objectives can be added with the existing ones to make the system more profitable and foolproof.
The next step is setting the direction to be followed so as to achieve the strategic objectives. In most cases, the options are multiple and from them, the management should determine the possible best one. After the direction is established, the strategies need to be implemented. At the final stage, the results from the implemented strategi...