HALLORAN METALS Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

HALLORAN METALS Case Study Solution

What are the strengths and weaknesses implicit in alien’s operating stance? In Halloran's? How would you expect an economic downturn to affect the two firms? An economic upturn?

Allied is one of the major competitors of Halloran Metals that operate from Lynn Massachusetts.From its initiation it pursued the same business strategy as of Halloran, until 1995, when the company switched its business strategy and started pursuing the focused product strategy. It narrowed its customer target market and also streamlined its offerings so to excel in the market under a certain product category range. This strategy posited great strength and weakness to the company operating stance.

HALLORAN METALS Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Strengths

Since the company redefined its customer target market, and started focusing on the potential high volume customers, it enabled the company to secure the low cost strategy while pursuing the operations.
Under the particular strategy, the company has been able to manage its ware house strategy and focus on one ware house to meet the demand of the customer. This lead to effective management of the inventory and warehousing cost and also lowered the tied up inventory cost of the company.
Since it focused on one warehouse, it enabled the company to cut the maintenance cost required to maintain the inventory of the different warehouse.
Also, the focused customer strategyallowed the company to channel its resourceseffectively into defined limited operations, leading to excel in market in a particularcategory.
Also, the company laid a new strategy of offering the product to these clients that orders full truck capacity (large orders). This improved the transportation cost of the company and also allowed it to meet the bulk order quantity on time under single delivery.
Since the company focused on limited target market and pursued the economies of scale while leading in market, it allowed the company to manage and streamline its pricing strategy, which made the product price of Allied lower to Halloran. This offered the company the competitive advantage to attract more businesses and customers due to cost efficiency.The trend is evident from the financial statements of Allied and Halloran, as sales of Halloran are lower as compared to Allied.
Lastly, under the new strategy, Allied has been able to reduce its cost of operations by taking effective measures to reduce the cost of limited defined operations.Also, it is evident from the financial statement, that the operating expense of Allied is $17,032 as compared to $ 32,886 of Halloran

Weakness

Since the company manages the operation through one warehouse, the security risk is high for Allied as compared to Halloran, as large amount of inventory is present in one warehouse, raising high risk of security, and maintenance.
Also, since the company has only one warehouse, any malfunctioning of the operations will hinder overall operations of the company, making it lose the credibility,leading to loss of sales and the inability to complete orders on time.
The full truck policy may ignore the potentiality of the small buyers and hence may lead to limited market opportunity.
Under the particular business and operation strategy, the company can not reduce the delivery time of orders.Especially in areas that are far from the Lynn warehouse location.The long delivery time creates an opportunity for the external player to capture the market share by meeting the market gap.....................

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