Essay Sample on Action Plan and Implementation Strategy

With a view on the SMART objectives and the SWOT analysis, the company's primary objective will be based on an improved level of customer service, inventory management, and reduction, increased efficiency in transportation, corporate goal visibility, and enhancement of the company procedures involving procurement. Precisely, Mainfreight will exploit the strengths of all available modes of transport through interlinking transport infrastructure and promoting the compatibility of transport growth with climate change mitigation and environmental protection.

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Since the primary objective is based on the five goals for the supply chain, this will improve operations and ensure customer satisfaction as well. Through this, it will guarantee the overall growth of operations and increase efficiency. Strengthening freight and logistics, along with providing environmental protection, is a significant objective that is likely to position Mainfreight at a high comparative and competitive advantage against its competitors.

Action Plan

Action Plan Steps, Timeline, Resources, Responsibilities, and KPIs.

Objective: With the objective of improving operations, promoting efficiency, and ensuring customer satisfaction, Mainfreight will exploit the strengths of all available modes of transport. The supply chain will interlink transport infrastructure and promote the compatibility of transport growth with climate change mitigation and environmental protection.

Action Steps:

With the goal of strengthening the modes of transport, the funding and innovation for combined transport will be increased to ensure that more traffic is shifted to the seaways and railways, which will provide environmental protection and relieve any congestion on the road.

The programs to ensure innovative technologies will be evolved, strengthened, and expanded.

In the short sea shipping, this will include reviewing the systemic advantage and disadvantages of quick sea shipping, identifying the criteria for selecting a means of transport, and developing new measured that will promote a shift of the flow of goods to seaways to ease road congestion.

Lobby for the revision of specific freight policies that will ensure varying track access charges by noise emissions

Create freight villages to ensure logistics interfaces that will help in the reorganization of the supply traffic majorly in urban areas.

Resources: Human resources, Financial support, and technical support.

• Responsibilities:
  
  The European Union will be essential to promote diversity in the European market.
• The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development will ensure the development of a comprehensive study on the issue of selecting modes of transport.
• Relevant agencies in the involved states.
• Local Agencies and Governments.
• Private Sector and development partners.

Timeline: The first, second, and third action plan steps will take four months, while the remaining steps will take 6 and 12 months consecutively.

KPIs: Within the action plan, similar KPIs will be applied since the company is still registering, increasing revenues, and projections indicate more increase in terms of revenue and profit in the 2020 fiscal year.

Action Plan Focus

Operations

As the action plan focuses on the operations, this will seek to improve the supply chain performance through the improvement of the distribution network. This is the operational center that controls the operations and highlights what the company should be built around. Also, it affects the activities in the company from delivery of service to sales strategy.

Accounting

Within the accounting as per the action plan, supplier management will be promoted through proper monitoring of cash flow. It involves tracking of payment conditions, provide clarity on the payment tools, record vendor bills, and other ways to ensure that all shipments and goods is tracked and accounted for.

Sales and Marketing

In the action plan, the sales and marketing activities will incorporate a distribution strategy which is essential in managing suppliers. It will give the company ideas on how to manage sales, deliveries, and boost customer service. A proper distribution strategy supports marketing as different market mix functions can be implemented.

Human Resources

As one of the most important departments in the company, this will include establishment of a proper communication chain or information conduits. It is intended to ensure that information can be sufficiently shared in the company between managers, supervisors, delivery personnel, and other employees.

Risk Management

In risk management, tracking of inventory will be essential. Through the use of tracking software and various record keeping spreadsheet, these will help monitor the company's position. However, to manage the external factors, the PESTEL analysis will be used to identify the external environment of Mainfreight. After the identification of specific external factors, the differentiation strategy, from Porter's strategies, will be applied to manage the factors (Rothaermel, 2016).

Action Plan Implementation Strategy

For the proposed action plan, it will be implemented by following five necessary steps:

Evaluation of the strategic action plan - As the first step of the implementation process, the involved managers must understand the action plan by carefully reviewing it and highlight elements that can be challenging. This will help identify any time, cost, and resources constraints in the action plan (Aaker & Adler, 2001).

Develop a vision for the action plan implementation - The vision will include selecting a series of goals that need to be achieved and a step by step process. The step will ensure that everyone is aware of what is expected and establish a clear view of what the action plan intends to accomplish.

Select a team to implement the action plan - The management ought to develop a proper team to help apply the outlines steps in the action plan (Guohui & Eppler, 2008).

Schedule meetings and reports for the action plan progress - Regardless of the position of the action, on schedule, behind schedule, or ahead of schedule, meetings should be organized to present the objectives and what has been accomplished. In this step, a reward system will be essential to recognize any success in the implementation of the action plan.

Involve the upper-level management - When necessary, the upper-level management should be involved to inform the shareholder, suppliers, and customer of any development in the company's operations. The management should address any issue that could arise or changes in the action plan (Aaker & Adler, 2001; Guohui & Eppler, 2008).

Bicultural Partnership Implications on the Proposed Action Plan

Through different ways, the external environment will significantly deliver implications to workforce development and service delivery. For example, will the changing socio-cultural, legal, political, and technical atmosphere, this will impact how the workforce interacts with developed strategic plans and the implementation method. In cases of unfavorable external conditions, this will hinder Mainfreight's service delivery affecting its market share.

Furthermore, the bicultural partnership may impact Mainfreight's service delivery and workforce development positively, as seen in New Zealand. In workforce development, biculturalism has enhanced the growth of business and teamwork as it could help solve arising issues in workforce creation and development with employees from different cultures (Hong, 2010). In the service delivery, biculturalism influence how a given selection of people relate with the company operations and managing its activities. Through bicultural partnerships, it could help in managing conflicts and identifying specific markets for Mainfreight.

References

Aaker, D. A., & Adler, D. A. (2001). Developing business strategies. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Guohui, S., & Eppler, M. J. (2008). Making strategy work: A literature review of the factors influencing strategy implementation. Handbook of Strategy Process Research, 252-276.

Hong, H. J. (2010). Bicultural Competence and its Impact on Team Effectiveness. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, 10(1), 93-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470595809359582.

Mainfreight Ltd. (2019). Annual Report, 2019. Mainfreight.com. https://www.mainfreight.com/Files/Downloads/Mainfreight%20Annual%20Report%202019.pdf.

Mainfreight Ltd. (2020). About Us. Mainfreight. https://www.mainfreight.com/global/en/global-home/about-us.aspx.

Rothaermel, F. T. (2016). Strategic management: concepts (Vol. 2). McGraw-Hill Education.