strategic management

The increasing threat of German industrial goods manufactures by product piracy and other types of unintentional know how transfer is all but accepted today. However, generally speaking, piracy management today is still rather reactive than preventive and in most parts the results of a more or less tactical planning approach. Strategic concerns such as the fundamental strategic fit of countermeasures and actual piracy situation have not yet been solved satisfactorily. Quality assurance in strategic decision making is a prerequisite for a successful strategy against product piracy. This article presents an approach to solve the issue based on the well-known quality function deployment (QFD) method.

Successful enterprises pursue strategies, which are unique and for this reason cannot easily be imitated by competitors. Such strategies are based on a smart combination of various strategic variables. These variables are the result of the characteristic questions of strategy development: Who are our customers? What are our products and services? How are these products and services provided? The handling of a vast amount of strategic variables requires a systematic approach. Therefore we introduce a method which combines characteristics of strategic variables on a discursive way which leads to coherent and promising strategy alternatives. Hence we solve another problem in the context of strategy development: We provide alternatives which are often omitted in practical experience due to time constraints. To overcome the limits of usual thinking - next to things being “en vogue” in industry - and to make substantiated decisions alternatives are necessary.

The paper highlights the importance of standards and standardisation especially for multinational enterprises. At the same time the threat of a not adequately reflected over-standardisation is recognised which is tied to risks like transaction costs and “idle power”. In the paper it is discussed to what extend it is possible to evaluate standards and standardisation in multinational enter- prises in terms of effort and benefits. This evaluation is anchored within a concept of standard management at a strategic level.

In the past few years importance of strategic management increased. Although enterprises invest into the development of strategies, many strategy processes fail in implementation. Today an important factor of influence is respected intuitively only: The level of detail of strategy. This article introduces an industry-proved tool, which determines the right level of detail for a successful strategy-implementation. Furthermore it allows a monitoring of strategy formulation and implementation-situation.