Vermont Teddy Bear SWOT Analysis

VTB's operational capabilities

To maintain a competitive advantage, VTB needs to build their business model keeping 5 strategic pillars in mind in order to achieve a high-performance company – Leadership, Innovation, Information Technology, Organizational excellence and agility and Knowledge. The Vermont management team grasped this concept in the initial stages of their development, but did not continue to embrace these pillars to ensure on-going success. VBT has most of their operational capabilities and strengths in the IT field as their business model is heavily based on IT. They do have some good operational capabilities, but they also face several challenges, especially during the peak seasons.

Their operational strengths and capabilities are:

• They hire a good workforce during the peak seasons to help process and pack gifts ordered by a large number of customers for delivery.

• During the peak time if and when the middleware pauses, the expert IT team members somehow help patch things together and ensure that all the deliveries are made on time.

• They have a strong core transaction processing infrastructure for meeting operational needs of a company this size.

• They have good practices in password management and recovery mechanisms. They have built-in redundancy in their systems. So if a network element fails their sales order systems still continue running so that the orders do not get lost.

• They have been hosting their ecommerce applications at collocation facilities outside Vermont and by doing that, they are able to get a more advantageous position on the national Internet backbone.

• They follow a best-of-breed approach where they purchase separate packages that offer closer to optimal functionality instead of...

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...ortant and not what someone needs them to work on because they think it is important.

• Standardize procedures and project management. E.g. use the same language or coding and decoding of software.

• Establish a change management process. All the changes need to be documented for the reference of other team members.

Appendix:

SWOT (Exhibit 1)

Strengths:

• Quality product

• BearGrams

• Closed retail stores

• Effective Packing/Shipping System change

• Employee Training and Loyalty

• Shelburne Factory Store Weaknesses:

• Insufficient management cover

• Financial Position

• Customer service

• Weak IT architecture

Opportunities:

• Distribution methods

• Outsourcing offshore

• Expansion to new markets

• Technological advances Threats:

• Disney-patents/Logos/Trademarks

• Competitors (flowers, gifts, collectibles)

• Products and services

• Seasonal Market demand of products