Strategic Management

Our vision was to be an industry leader in the bike manufacturing market. We planned to achieve this by focusing our efforts in the specialized higher quality niche segments. Since we focused on higher end segments of the market, we placed a lot of value on making sure our bikes were of the highest quality and lived up to the needs of our consumer's technical expectations.

Strategies

We laid out a strategy for our marketing, operations, finance, and product development divisions. We chose to produce bikes in the Adventure and Racer segments. These segments fit nicely together because they both focused on quality, performance, and were comprised of a certain type of customer. In general, the customers were people who were outdoorsy and were looking to get a workout from their bikes. Another reason we wanted to get into these segments was because the bikes that were offered in these two markets also rendered a higher price because of their quality and high performance, and we wanted to capitalize on the potential profits by keeping our costs down.

For our operations strategy, we immediately increased our workforce and the size of our plant. This allowed us to prepare for the launch of our Racer bike. We increased our batch size, which allowed us to decrease our number of setups. This in turn, increased our capacity and decreased our down time. The down side of increasing our batch size was that it would decease our delivery. But, the customers we were targeting are not sensitive to delivery time. Overall, this coincided with the strategy of our firm. Also in our operations strategy, we dedicated many of our resources to achieving high quality since quality was a main focus for us. To uphold the quality of our products, we reviewed the budgets of Quality Systems Technology and Preventative Maintenance on an annual basis and increased these budgets when necessary.

The finance strategy we developed was pretty straight-forward. To earn...