I had just finished just finished working that evening, as I wash off to proceed on my journey, my phone was buzzing, hurriedly I managed to stretch out my hand to reach it. A great news had occurred but even I was not aware. It was my friend whom his wife was heavy. "A set of Twins? " I exclaimed as, I was delighted. My friend was filled with unending joy and the man whom always took life very fast slowed down. That became a key factor of success that motivated him to change the course of his life and how he perceived life itself.
Today I will be discussing the power of the KFS in strategic planning and how this can be used to aid organizations and most importantly anything we do in life.
WHAT IS KFS
Business strategy is about the difference between organization, this is related in the form of comparative advantage. Without any Competition in the market there will be no need for strategic planning, therefore companies plan to enable them gain market edge over their competition, this provides the sole purpose for strategic planning ad strategies.
We can relate the that Key factors success can be seen in terms of comperative advantage but this time in terms or relationship to its products majorly and in then to the market. The key factor of success of a company or product is that one product which will influence that company success in the market. This is exactly what strategy is all about, to identify the KFS and use it to the advantage of the company or product.
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The goal of the team is to identify the KFS
HOW TO USE KFS TO COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
Identifying the KFS maybe easy based on the complexity of your product or services, the first thing to do in strategic planning would be to identify your KFS of your company and your product.
This is done by narrowing down all the products and services you offer to see which is making the more sales. The questions you will need to ask is;
Why are we selling more here than there?
Are resources evenly distributed to meet the needs of the services we render equally?
What should we do differently?
When you are able to determine that where you make the 70% of the revenue for the company is the KFS.
Therefore to gain more market share and profitability, the management will need to allocate resources more resources to the company's KFS. If the company allocation of resources is no different from competitors, then there will be no change. But if the company identify one crucial point and concentrate it's resources towards that point, it's chances of competition in the market may as well double it's success. The goal of the company will be to concentrate in a single strategic function, become really great at it that it makes them competitive and then switch to consolidate a lead in other functions with the profit that the top concentration has made. This is the shortest cut to succeed in any industry.
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Concentrate resources to the KFS
TEST CASES SUCCESS AND FAILURES
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Apple identified their KFS and it succeeded
APPLE
When Jobs was invited to retake Apple, the magic he did was to cut off all the products that apple sold that was already saturated in the market. They had to refocus their energy into one product others where not focusing at the time. This gave birth to IPOD, and in turn we can see the success of the Apple company with the iPhone today.
BlackBerry
I still think that why BlackBerry later failed in the market was because they sold their KFS. The one thing that made BlackBerry unique was it's BBM and unique ID which was used only by its users. Unfortunately, they did not retain it. Imagine if BlackBerry concentrated it's resources around making this KFS more competitive, maybe the story will be different.
CONCLUSION
A lot of companies around the world uses this method to its advantage, Toyota, Sony, etc. Little wonder why a product or service is discontinued by a company.
Let's discuss, do you know of any company you think might have used the KFS? Please share your experience.