Summary
In the context of strategic planning, organizations are expected to make decisions targeted at achieving profitability and maximizing their operations. Thus, by making clear the long-term goals and visions of a company, the management has the opportunity to align the short-term tasks and responsibilities with a broader mission. This shows that strategic decision-making is necessary for ensuring that the steps that a company takes would inevitably bring it to the When it comes to specific strategic decisions that enhance the capabilities of a company, one of the examples is the switch from a traditional in-store business to e-commerce.
This decision involves the restructuring of an organization because of the shift of a sales method. This shows that the items that an organization offers become more widely available to more people in different geographic locations, which leads to an increased need for optimizing operations (Anderson et al. 245). Optimization modeling is a quantitative tool that can be used to address the challenges that a company may face during strategic shifts.
Through combining such components as the objective function, a collection of decision variables, and a collection of constraints, optimization models can help their users determine the specific aspects that should be changed in order to reach optimum performance.
Another example of a strategic decision is the automation of manual processes. For instance, in a warehouse, the sorting, loading, and other types of manual work are done by machines. This strategic decision is concerned with not only process restructuring but also with purchasing new equipment and giving employees who were performing manual work other tasks and responsibilities.
Companies that manufacture products can also shift from manual to machine work as a way of reducing costs spent on human resources as well as optimizing the time necessary to produce each item. An optimization model is especially important in such a case because an organization expects to reach a level of operations that would enhance the capabilities and ensure that there are no disruptions during the change from manual to automated work.
Reaction
Strategic decisions are those that are associated with entire environments in which companies operate, the entire resources, as well as the human power necessary to capitalize on available resources. They deal with a broad range of organizational activities targeted at reaching the objectives that would make a company what it is intended to be. The article by Alhawamdeh and Alsmairat provides a comprehensive discussion of strategic decision-making at organizations. By conducting a review of the literature on the topic of strategic decision-making, the authors discovered that the process plays an essential role in contributing to the effectiveness of organizations (4).
Both internal and external environmental factors influence the decision-making process of organizations and encourage managers to make effective strategic decisions. Because of this, the researchers point to the importance of using decision-support systems in the form of optimization modeling as well as other quantitative methods that can provide enough sufficient information in a timely manner. Therefore, the improvement of strategic decisions is a direct result of how effectively can organizations use optimization modeling as a both forecasting and managing method. In summary, it is essential to mention that research on strategic decision-making as related to quantitative methods is limited, which calls for the implementation of future studies on the topic.
Works Cited
Alhawamdeh, Hamzeh, and Mohammad Alsmairat. “Strategic Decision Making and Organization Performance: A Literature Review.” International Review of Management and Marketing, vol. 9, no. 4, 2019, pp. 95-99.
Anderson, David, et al. Quantitative methods for business with CengageNOW. 13 ed., Cengage Learning, 2016.