Lawn Care’s Current Strategic Mission

Question #1

Define Lawn Care’s current strategic mission, strategy, competitive priorities, value chain, and how it wins customers. What are the order qualifiers and winners?

Strategic Mission

Provide the customers with the highest quality physical goods.

Strategy

To ensure customers with exceptionally organic product, goods specifically designed for the individual customer and on time delivery service.

Competitive priorities

The Lawn care company has two main competitive priorities:

1. Quality- provide with the highest quality and organic grass seeds and fertilizers

2. Time- It delivers it products in best condition right on time

Value chain

1) Suppliers of water, chemicals, tools

2) Inputs- water, seeds, chemicals, equipment, labor, knowledge

3) Process- production of seeds and fertilizers

4) Outputs – grass seeds and fertilizers and delivery

5) Transportation services- Delivery

How it wins customers

Providing on time delivery of high quality grass seeds and fertilizers and focusing on their target market, which are parks and golf courses are the main means for the company to win customers.

Order qualifiers

The customers expect to have:

• Green and healthy grass

• Nutritious fertilizers

• Beautifully shaped golf courses

• Parks and golf courses entirely and equally covered by grass

Order winners

The main features differentiating the Lawn Care Company’s products from others are:

• Premium quality goods

• Correctly and narrowly targeted customers

Question #2

Draw the major stages of the value chain with and without an application service and comment on the role of operations in each.

Pre and Post Service View of the Value Chain

Without Application Services

Pre and Post Service View of the Value Chain

With Application Services

In the first two stages the role of operations consists of resource management, which includes oversight of inventory, purchasing and supplies and human resource management. Also financial management plays a huge role, which consists of forecasting sales and cost-benefit analyzes. In third and fourth stages, operations are mainly concerned with quality management and inbound logistics.

Question #3

What problems, if any, do you see with Lawn care’s company current strategy, vision, customer benefit package and value chain design, and pre- and postservices?

The company has some problems with its strategy and customer benefit package (CBP). One of the problems is that company is concentrated on the product quality and ignores the other things such as pre and post-services. The lawn care company has competitive advantage over its competitors in terms of quality as it is known as “highest quality grass and fertilizer producer”. On the other hand, sometimes the company had problems with its customers because the grass was not perfect as it was being used by not professionals and with inappropriate equipment. Thus, this brought to worse quality than it actually is.

To solve these problems we think that the company should introduce complementary “goods” like professional care, grass cut, fertilization of soil, fighting against diseases etc. Also, it will be great if it includes a delivery and science-based implementation services. The latter means that the company might have a pre-sale assessment of land to assist their clients