Assessment Details Step 1: Choose a Company In the first Competency Assessment, you completed a SWOT analysis on a successful company that demonstrated a sustainable competitive advantage in the marke

Learning Objective

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Select and research a company that is having financial difficulties or is on the brink of bankruptcy.

Conduct a strategic analysis of the company’s current financial operations. Determine strategies for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace and increasing financial performance.

Write a 750 to 1,000-word analysis. When writing your analysis, complete the following:

[Evaluate Current Financial Plan]

Evaluate the company’s current financial plan, including charts and/or graphs showing financial data from the struggling company and make recommendations for improvement.

This section presents sound points about the firm’s significant revenue declines and net losses from 2015-2017, and connects these to some of the business conditions the firm was facing. This section benefits from presenting the detailed financial data from the firm’s 10-K income statement, but needs to then craft a fuller and deeper assessment. In particular work to identify the sources of those losses (this will begin with the firm’s declining revenues, but will also need to “dig deeper” into its key expenses).

This section then touches upon sound points regarding the firm’s liquidity problems (here back this up by comparing current assets to current liabilities). This section then needs to build upon this with a fuller and deeper assessment of the firm’s balance sheet, including long-term liabilities (look not only at long-term debt, but also other long-term liabilities). Use this deeper assessment to reach your own conclusions regarding the firm’s financial health/financial position.

This section touches upon the firm’s cash flows, although it’s not clear where the “overdrawn” figure comes from. This, too, would benefit from a fuller and deeper assessment, which will help to give further insights into both the assessments of financial performance and financial health above.

In all of these do work to take a fuller advantage of the more detailed financial data, as well as the “management discussion” of its results to help to fuel your financial analyses above. As they say “the devil is in the details”, and this is certainly true with Sears.

83% / ME

[Strategies for Sus Comp Adv]

Determine strategies for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace and increasing financial performance.

This section presents a strengthened assessment of sound proposals that would help with the firm’s turnaround. This section would benefit from building upon this to first assess what strategic foundation you would propose. Here do consider the comments regarding business-level strategies from submission #1 (I get the sense that you have may have gone through some or much of this strategic thinking process, so now it is just a matter of crystalizing and capturing your strategic thinking).

85% / ME

[Plan to Implem Proposed Strat]

Create a plan to implement the strategies you selected.

This section presents sound implementation proposals, and is best considered when taken in combination with the section above, which also presents sound implementation points (noting that it is best to keep the section above focused on your strategic choices for creating a competitive advantage, and keeping the implementation proposals for presentation in this section). This section will be further strengthened by the deeper strategic assessment above, choosing both a business-level strategy and the specific key drivers. As a part of this be open to changing the implementation proposals already presented, as well as augmenting them with new proposals, in particular for implementing the key drivers that are chosen. Work to strengthen this further by more fully integrating these implementation proposals with near-term “stop the bleeding“ financial fixes discussed at the end of section 1.

88% / MA