Tamer Group Strategic Plan Paper Example

Tamer group is an organization in Saudi Arabia that deals with pharmaceuticals manufacturing, medical equipment and distribution, high-end third-party logistics services, pharmaceutical retail and the supply of nutrition, beauty, wellness and prestige products. The groups companies have joint ventures with several leading pharmaceutical companies in the world. It first began manufacturing its pharmaceuticals in 2001. Tamer group was established in 1922 as the first pharmacy in Saudi Arabia, located in Jeddah by Mohammed Said Tamer. Its headquarters is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Forbes, 2012). The companys activities include importing, marketing, distribution, sales manufacturing and promotion. Tamer group has also expanded into other areas such as finance and real estate. It has several branches across Saudi Arabia, other regions in the Middle East and North Africa, with more than 3,000 employees.

Organizations take different approaches to secure their future, and so is the success of the organizations with a formal strategy in place and those who do not. The group had made significant strides since 1992 when it was established as a single store with most of its medicine prepared at the store. Mohammed died in 1961 leaving behind his two sons as the only employee at that time. The second and the third generation of the family, company has been responsible for most of the growth of the pharmaceutical company. Today the company is a principal player in the Saudi market, with branches all over the kingdom and the GCC country and the Middle East North Africa Region (World Finance, 2014). These strides have been achieved due to the strategies that were applied by the management during the period of growth. However, due to the uncertain future, the company needs to apply a different strategy that will ensure continuous growth.

Concepts, Theories, and Principles of Strategic planning

Strategic planning is viewed as a component of strategic management; it is also one of the leading tools in an organizations management and an element of an organization's management. Planning is one of the most complex processes for any organization because of the necessity to work with general info and events that have not yet occurred (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2017). However, for any organization to reach the planned results, these events must take place. According to Trotter, (1981), most strategies in any organization are built on specific beliefs about the future, which is sometimes unpredictable, this is the main problem faced by many organizations. However, modern organizations have realized the importance of strategic planning due to the uncertainty of the markets and the competitiveness. Most companies that fail due to the wrong strategy instead of the lousy economic situation, this is due to the reason that the leadership of the specific organizations feels like the creation of a strategy is labor consuming and expensive.

Planning has become a ubiquitous activity engaged in by individuals, organizations, and countries. Applying a broad approach to planning is healthy for any organization. The broad approach seeks insight in social-economic, ethical conditions and the environmental context of the organization that undertakes the planning. It is necessary for the management to understand that the industrial environment is the core of the firms external environment. This environment is defined by the organization's relationship with its customers, suppliers, and competitors. Therefore strategy is a link between the organization and its external environment. This is the notion of the strategic fit that the leadership of Tamer Group should consider before implementing the strategic plan. For the organization to be successful in its strategy, it must be consistent with its external environment as well as with the internal environment (goals, value, capabilities, resources, structure, and systems). Its failure will be due to a lack of consistency with either the two (Grant & Jordan, 2015).

From a perspective of theory and strategic practice management has moved from "financial budgeting" in the late 50s, to corporate planning in the 60s, to marketing positioning in the 70s and globalization, and learning of organization at present. Therefore, it is safe to say due to the dynamic nature of organizations in the modern world there is no unifying theory supporting its growing practice. For the strategic plan to be successful, it is vital for the senior executive leadership team of Tamer Group to apply strategic thinking attributes during the process. These attributes ( the perspective of Mintzberg) are systematic perspective, intent, intelligent opportunism, time consciousness and theory-based (Jofre, 2011). They need to have the ability to think or perceive reality in the broadest scope possible, to overview both the systems and the processes involved.

The second attribute is to ensure that all the individuals in the firm have a shared sense of direction, purpose, fate, and focus; this allows all the individuals to focus their energy towards achieving a common goal. The third attribute is the ability to be open to strategic opportunities within the intent-driven firm. Tamer company should be able to adjust to changing the environment as well as relying on the top management to foresee changes and be capable of considering taking unforeseen strategic opportunities. Time consciousness is the continuous awareness of the strategic relationship between the past, present and the future. The organization's management should use the past learning experience and the present events to plan for the future. Abandoning the past experience will lead to an inevitable failure of the strategic plan. The last attribute mirrors scientific method. The firm managers should be able to use the increasing volume of data at their disposal to test for valid hypothesis (Mohammadian, 2017).

Stages of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is an endless process for improving a company's performance by developing strategies to produce results. Therefore, in this strategic plan, there are four stages that the organization will apply to maximize its results. The stages involve looking at where the firm wants to go, accessing its current situation and therefore developing implementing approaches for moving ahead (Grant & Jordan, 2015). The framework that will be utilized to ensure that Tamer achieves its goal comprises of four distinct stages. The first stage will be to prepare. The critical steps involved here are visioning, assessing and the development and implementing of a planning process, second is developing a plan considering the needs, resources, and strengths of the organization. Third, is implementing, ensuring that organization is guided by the plan throughout its work by communicating or marketing the plan to the workforce, managing and implementing the plan and supervising and monitoring the progress, which will be the responsibility of the Firms management. Lastly, due to changing dynamics, it is necessary for the plan to be consistently revised/reviewed to keep it current and meaningful without aborting the plan.

Strategic Planning Process

Strategic planning takes its roots from theories of planning; therefore, it is essential to ensure the management understands specific conditions of planning which apply to all types of planning in any organization. In this case, the strategic planning intends to establish a viable connection among the organizations long-term objectives, its current resources, and the environmental conditions by using favorable methods and activities. The steps of the strategic planning process are defining the organizations mission and goals, analyzing of its external environment, identifying its internal strengths and weaknesses and research an analysis of strategic alternative (Berzins, 2016).

The companys mission and goals are to increase human capital, especially women and increase employees retention. Currently, it has employee royalty which has driven the growth of the company since most of the employee has made the company their second home. However, the organization has limited resources to human capital. Saudi Arabia, in general, has an acute shortage of skilled and unskilled domestic workforce. The country has been making intense efforts addressing the human capital development challenges. Since it is transitioning from an oil-based economy to a knowledge-based one, there is a call for an increase in the country's human capital within a short span of time (Bokhari, 2017). Due to this development Tamer Group, since it deals with a sensitive area it is one of the most affected industries in the region. Therefore, developing and empowering its workforce is its critical goals for future success.

Tamer Group has a logistic academy that invests in attracting, qualifying and improving competencies in their new employees joining the Tamer workforce. The group takes upon itself to train its employee on the job; its carefully designed intensive training programmes are co-sponsored by the Human Resource Development Fund. The academy has not achieved much regarding increasing skilled labor in its workforce. Women are the least represented in the organization. The company has only 60 female employees out of the 3000 employees in total, which it intends to grow the number to about 300 or at least 10% of the organization's workforce and empower them to compete for the leadership positions (Esfandiari, 2005). With a skilled and more competitive workforce, Tamer Group will be in a position to compete in the global market and increase its competitive strength within the region. The primary objectives of planning on how to achieve these goals are to prevent an adverse effect of uncertainty and change and focusing on the primary objectives of the long-term goal.

Strategy Planning Activities

Diversification of Tamer Group Human Capital

Diversification is the expensing of an existing film to another product line or field of operation (Grant & Jordan, 2015). The diversification of a firm can be related or unrelated to what the firms want to expand on. However, in this case, it comes in the form of human capital. Due to the limited amount of female employee, the organization's agenda is to employ more women and train more to increase its workforce. The main benefit is growth, to boost its growth to the global market Tamer needs to empower its women, which in return will inspire more women to join the industry and therefore increase the competitiveness of the workforce. Risk reduction is a benefit the organization will gain from diversification (Woods & Sterns, 1998). Tamer is continuously at the risk of the low workforce. Therefore more human capital will ensure that the company is fully empowered to venture into the global market without the fear of having less competent or less workforce. McGinnis, (2015) suggests that the best way to approach the situation is starting from the least empowered people in the society to bring competitiveness to the organization and increase retention.

Redesigning Tamer Academy

As the industrial and global environment becomes more competitive, complex and less predictable, survival requires the company to perform at a higher level. Regardless of its academy becoming useful, it does not produce enough for the organizations needs therefore for the need to expand its facility and increase the level of education for its employee is hig...