Analyze the strategic fit between the business and corporate strategies of the company.Does the company employ diversification, vertical integration, or globalization?

Business Strategy

Explain the generic business strategies for the company. Include cost, differentiation, and focus or hybrid information.

Analyze the business strategy the company uses in its marketplace approach. Provide examples of how the strategy is used to position the company in a competitive environment.

Analyze the company’s business model:

What are the core products?

How does the organization make money?

What is the customer value proposition?

What is the profit proposition?

Analyze the corporate strategy of the company. Include the product, geographical, and vertical scope in which it operates.

Has the company expanded from its original product line or field of operation?

Does the company own vertically related activities along the value chain for its products?

Analyze the overall corporate structure and key management systems.

Does the company employ diversification, vertical integration, or globalization?

Are global alliances part of the corporate strategy?

Analyze the strategic fit between the business and corporate strategies of the company.

Identify Caterpillar Inc.’s short-term and long-term goals.Evaluate how mergers and acquisitions in the last 3-5 years have contributed to Caterpillar Inc.’s performance and affected its organizational goals.

Review the Strategic Management Project Background document.

Review the following terms and concepts discussed this week to prepare for this assignment:

vertical integration
taper integration
backward vertical integration
forward vertical integration
strategic alliances
global strategy
international strategy
innovation

Create a Microsoft Word doc and title it Strategic Management Research Journal Part 4.

Identify Caterpillar Inc.’s short-term and long-term goals.

Evaluate how mergers and acquisitions in the last 3-5 years have contributed to Caterpillar Inc.’s performance and affected its organizational goals.

Determine the most critical merger or acquisition that has contributed to Caterpillar’s performance and success in achieving organizational goals. Defend your choice.

Evaluate the effectiveness of Caterpillar’s operational plan for global strategies (international, multi-domestic, global-standardization, or transnational). Include supporting research or data.

Use a research writing format, that includes the use of the 3rd person, and APA formatting for the title page, headings, in-text citations, and reference list.

What role have prior strategies played in shaping the distinctive competencies of Pembina Pipeline Corporation? What has been the role of luck?

Pembina Pipeline Corporation.

Module 4:

This module deals with the competitive position of Pembina Pipeline Corporation. With the information you have at your disposal, perform the tasks and answer the questions listed:

1. Identify whether Pembina Pipeline Corporation has a competitive advantage or disadvantage in its primary industry.

2. Evaluate Pembina Pipeline Corporation against the four generic building blocks of competitive advantage: efficiency, quality, innovation and responsiveness to customers. How does this exercise help you understand the performance of Pembina Pipeline Corporation relative to its competitors?

3. What are the distinctive competencies of Pembina Pipeline Corporation?

4. What role have prior strategies played in shaping the distinctive competencies of Pembina Pipeline Corporation? What has been the role of luck?

5. Do the strategies Pembina Pipeline Corporation is pursuing now build on its distinctive competencies? Are they an attempt to build new competencies?

6. What are the barriers to imitating the distinctive competencies of Pembina Pipeline Corporation?

7. Is there any evidence that Pembina Pipeline Corporation finds it difficult to adapt to changing industry conditions? If so, why do you think that is the case
Module 5:

This module deals with the ability of Pembina Pipeline Corporation to achieve superior efficiency, quality, innovation and responsiveness to customers. With the information you have at your disposal, answer the questions and perform the tasks listed:

1. Is Pembina Pipeline Corporation pursuing any efficiency enhancing practices?

2. Is Pembina Pipeline Corporation pursuing any quality enhancing practices?

3. Is Pembina Pipeline Corporation pursuing any practices to enhance innovation?

4. Is Pembina Pipeline Corporation pursuing any practices designed to increase responsiveness to customers?

5. Evaluate the competitive position of your company in light of your answers to questions 1-4. Explain what, if anything, Pembina Pipeline Corporation needs to do to improve its competitive position.

Module 6:

This part of the project focuses on the nature of Pembina Pipeline Corporation business-level strategy. If Pembina Pipeline Corporation operates in more than one business, concentrate on either its core, or most central, business or on its most important business. Using all the information you have collected on your company so far, answer the following questions:

1. How differentiated are the products or services of Pembina Pipeline Corporation? What is the basis of their differentiated appeal?

2. What is Pembina Pipeline Corporation’s strategy toward market segmentation? If it segments its market, on what basis does it do so?

3. What distinctive competencies does Pembina Pipeline Corporation have? Is efficiency, quality, innovation or customer responsiveness, or a combination of these factors the main driving force in your company?

4. Based on these product, market, and distinctive competency choices, what generic business level strategy is Pembina Pipeline Corporation pursuing?

5. What are the advantages and disadvantages associated with Pembina Pipeline Corporation’s choice of business level strategy?

6. Is your company a member of a strategic group in an industry? If so, which one?

7. How could you improve its business level strategy to strengthen its competitive advantage?

Module 7:

This module requires you to identify how Pembina Pipeline Corporation might profit from global expansion, the strategy that your company should pursue globally, and the entry mode that it might favour.With the information that you have at your disposal, answer the questions regarding the following two situations

Your company is already doing business in other countries.

1. Is Pembina Pipeline Corporation creating value or lowering costs of value creation by realizing location economies, transferring distinctive competencies abroad, or realizing cost economies from the experience curve? If not, does it have the potential to do so?

2. How responsive is Pembina Pipeline Corporation to differences among nations?

Does it vary its product and marketing message from country to country? Should it?

3. What are the cost pressures and pressures for local responsiveness in the industry in which Pembina Pipeline Corporation is based?

4. What strategy is Pembina Pipeline Corporation pursuing to compete globally? In your opinion, is this the correct strategy?

5. What major foreign market does Pembina Pipeline Corporation serve, and what mode has it used to enter this market?

Why is Pembina Pipeline Corporation active in these markets and not others?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using this mode?

Might another mode be preferable?

Module 8:

This module requires you to assess the vertical integration and diversification strategy being pursued by Pembina Pipeline Corporation. With the information you have at your disposal, answer the questions and

perform the following tasks:

1. Has Pembina Pipeline Corporation ever pursued a horizontal integration strategy?

What was the strategic reason for pursuing this strategy?

2. How vertically integrated is Pembina Pipeline Corporation?

3. Assess the potential for Pembina Pipeline Corporation to create value through vertical integration.

In reaching your conclusions, also consider bureaucratic costs of managing vertical integration.

4. Is Pembina Pipeline Corporation involved in any long-term cooperative arrangements with suppliers or buyers

? If so, how are these relationships structured?

Do you think that these relationships add value to the company? Why?