Panera Bread Company SWOT Analysis Assignment (Term Paper Sample)

Panera Bread Company Analysis
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Institution Affiliation
Panera Bread Company Analysis
1.0 Introduction
According to Rao and Krishna (2005), organizations do not operate in isolation but operate in an environment that is affected by various factors. Therefore, it is essential to the organization to conduct an analysis of its internal environment with the aim of ascertaining its strengths and weaknesses and also its external market with the aim of identifying its threats and opportunities. There are a number of tools that management could rely on like the SWOT analysis and Porter’s Five Forces model. A careful analysis using these tools could help an organization to understand its position in the market and how it could enhance its competitiveness. This report will evaluate Panera Bread Company internal strengths and weaknesses, external opportunities and threats (SWOT).
2.0 Company profile
Panera Bread is an American public company operating in the fast food industry and was founded in the year 1987. The company operates a chain of fast-casual restaurants and bakery café in Canada and United States. Panera Bread is headquartered in sunset hills, Missouri and some of its offerings include sandwiches, soups, flat bread, bakery items, iced drinks, fruit smoothies, pasta, and salads. The company has a food policy which was unveiled in the year 2014, and details Panera Bread commitment to transparency, clean ingredients and to positively impact on the food system. Additionally, Panera Bread is engaged in social responsibility and community outreach programs which provide baked goods and unsold bread to the local community charities and hunger relief agencies.
3.0 Internal Strengths and Weaknesses
Pickton and Wright (2012) argue that strengths are organization factors that have a positive implication on its operations and activities. As such, the strengths add value as well as offering a competitive advantage to the organization. Organization strengths include both tangible and intangible assets. On the other hand, weaknesses refer to the organization characteristics that are detrimental to its growth and future success. As such, weaknesses place a company at a disadvantage in comparison with the competitors.
Panera Bread strengths and weaknesses will be analyzed on the four major elements of the management process, demonstrating the manner in which each of the element is related to a company strength or weakness.
3.1 Leading
Leading refers to the ability to communicate, inspire, encourage and motivate employees to achieve higher productivity. As such, in organization leadership plays a crucial role its failure or success (Weihrich & Koontz, 2015). In the case of Panera Bread, leadership is one of its strengths. Panera Bread has a strong leadership at all its levels of management, which has been instrumental to its success over the last 30 years of its operation.
An evaluation of two senior managers in the company reveals strong traits for effective leadership like enthusiasm, dominance, self-assurance, social boldness and tough-mindedness. Additionally, the managers exhibited skills and behaviors for effective leadership like the ability to build relationship, courage, trust, collaboration, drive for results, strategic perspective and walking the talk.
According to Weihrich and Koontz (2015), motivation is the ability to get other people to do something because they love and want to do it. Motivation plays a significant role in organization success and should thus, be at the centre of leadership. Panera Bread observed managers employ various strategies to motivate their employees like recognizing hard work, encouraging employee even after they fail and involving employees in setting targets and goals. As such, motivational strategies adopted by managers at Panera Bread would be considered as effective.
Situational leadership refers to a leadership style that enables a manager to adjust his style to fit his followers’ development level (Vecchio, 2012). The managers have adopted different situational leadership style. One of the managers has adopted coaching and delegating styles of leadership while the other manager uses directing and supporting style. Employee empowerment is the means in which employees are given the authority to take proactive decisions and to autonomously analyze situations. Both managers use similar strategies to empower employees. These strategies include granting sufficient authority, building the confidence of the employees, providing adequate resources and information as well as providing the necessary skills for the job.
3.2 Controlling
Controlling refers to the process of establishing a mechanism to compare the actual results with the targeted outcome. As such, controlling involves directing and measuring the actual performance against the standards or organization planned goals (Weihrich & Koontz, 2015). Panera Bread has established a number of productivity controls such as comparing the number of units produced per hour against the expected production, comparing the total cost against total sales, comparing the actual sales revenue against the projected sales revenue and ascertaining the number of customer complaints received in a particular period. The productivity controls established by Panera Bread are a source of strength as they ensure production of quality products at reasonable costs.
Also, Panera Bread quality practices include Total Quality Management and ISO. Panera Bread has adopted total quality management as a means of ensuring its long-term success by ensuring customer satisfaction. As such, the total quality management approach has enabled Panera Bread to use data, effective communication and different strategies to integrate quality into the organization activities and culture. Additionally, Panera Bread adoption of ISO quality management helps ensure the organization meets the regulatory and statutory requirements related to its products, thus, helping meet the needs of other stakeholders and customers.
Panera Bread uses a management information system which uses collected data through transaction processing to create reports used by managers to make day to day decisions to solve and respond to problems. The system has been quite effective and instrumental in helping managers make day to day decisions.
3.3 Planning
Panera Bread major weakness is its planning. Planning involves formulating detailed plans to facilitate efficient use of the organization scarce resources. As such, the planning process should involve; identifying the goals to be achieved, formulating the various strategies to achieve those goals and implementing, directing and monitoring the steps involved in its implementation (Weihrich & Koontz, 2015).
Panera Bread has a strategic plan in place which is supposed to guide its current and future operations in the market. However, the strategic plan has not been reviewed since its adoption. The failure to continuously review the strategic plan is one of the weaknesses of Panera Bread. Therefore, it could be argued that Panera Bread lacks a plan for the current and future competitive market.
The Panera Bread planning process does not adequately address the changes in the industry environment as it does not provide a guideline of how to address changes in technological forces, environmental requirements as well as the legal and political factors. The failure of Panera Bread to ensure proper planning process erodes the ability of the company to take advantage of the available in the environment as well to adopt the right strategies to address the threats posed by the external environment. Also, it affects the company competitiveness as it puts it at a disadvantage compared to its competitors. As such, the planning aspect of Panera Bread is a major weakness to it, and if not addressed it could limit its future growth and success.
3.4 Organizing
Organizing is the logical process of co-coordinating, structuring and integrating organization activities and task goals to attain organization specific objectives (Weihrich & Koontz, 2015). Panera Bread management has strong organizing skills which a strength of the company. Panera Bread has adopted a hybrid organization design which integrates functional organization design and the matrix organization design. The adoption of the hybrid design enables the company to enjoy the benefits of the functional and matrix designs while easing each other disadvantages. As such, the chosen organization design acts a source of Panera Bread competitive edge. Some of the issues relating to job design in Panera Bread include; job sharing, task revision, telecommuting and skill development. However, the disparity in salaries and wages between various employees level is an issue of concern to Panera Bread. The Panera Bread management should consider addressing the issue so as to boost employees’ morale especially those at the lowest levels of management.
Panera Bread has a strong organization culture which supports flexibility for the future need to change. As such, there are no identified issues in Panera Bread related to its culture that could affect the organization flexibility with respected to future need to change.
4.0 External opportunities and threats
According to the Cole (2009), the opportunities and threats of an organization relate to its external environment analysis. The external analysis in important as it helps the management assess the opportunities available to an organization and the level of threat faced by an organization from the external environment. Panera Bread opportunities and threats could be better analyzed through the use of “ porter’s five forces model” as well as considering the role of macro-environment forces and their relevance as discuss...