Eddie Stobart Case Study

In this case study, i am going to analyse and identify macro/micro business

environment in respect of Stobart Group and the impact of the factors on the Group's business, with its core competencies and threats, Also to make suggestions as to how the group could implement the recommendations.

Introduction

Stobart Group as an FTSE 250 company and comprises of four main divisions,

Road, Rail, Ports and Air, known as multimodal transport and logistics solution which means providing customers with a choice of the most cost efficient and environmentally friendly solutions available to meet their customer requirements. The Group also provides warehousing, storage and handling facilities. Its customers cut across a wide variety of retail, manufacturing and public customers across the food, consumer, industrial and defence sectors.

The Group operates over 1850 trucks, 3000 trailers and four rail freight services and a port. It also operates around 6 million square feet of warehouses and employs up to 5500 people over 40 strategically located sites across the UK and Europe. These services are fully integrated and do not function as a separate businesses, in many cases they share the same customer base and the same operating sites.

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The Stobart Group is renowned its forward thinking and has embraced social networking platforms such as Face book and Twitter to consolidate and grow its brand and to keep the public, its clients and shareholders fully informed and up-to-date with its activities. The Group has its own Member's Club with some 20,000 dedicated followers and retails a wide variety of branded merchandise (superbrands.com)

Macro Business Environment

Whilst the broad economic climate going forward looks uncertain, the Board considers that the Group has the right strategy, systems and people in place not only to show resilience, but to prosper through times of economic hardship.

With the economic downturn, there are clear signs Stobart Group is delivering on its strategy. And because of limited funding from banks and other institutions, the Group's board has considered it to re-invest some of the cash generated by its operations. It has also made a number strategic bolt-on acquisitions, which gave them greater capacity and brought on board a number of high quality people to the Group, and they have also now as a priority bring their brand and systems expertise to these new areas of activity to realise operational synergies and profitability ( stobartgroup.com, ar,2009).

The Group's quick expansion due to organic growth and acquisition needed to amalgamate six disparate business groups into one organisation. This required a change of IT strategy and move to create centralised IT system, also because of users complain of slow application performers speeds when attempting to access files and documents over the WAN. This made the Group to deploy the Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its organisation.

With this new appliances deployed the Stobart Group is now able to continue with its IT consolidation projects. Employee's productivity has been increased as users can now access files and applications in minutes and seconds, instead of hours and minutes, and file sharing amongst employees has significantly improved.

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The Group is also benefitting from the cost saving associated with the removal of local servers, and an improvement in the file integrity and security as file backups can now be performed centrally, as the company is now associated with reduced licensing and management costs as well as increasing efficiency of the IT department t(riverbed.com).

And due to environmental protection and waste reduction policies imposed by the government, the Group has worked hard to eliminate waste through filling up empty journeys and considering other modes of transport. Their fleet utilization has increased from 82.1% to 83.9% meaning that only 16% of vehicles are travelling without load. In terms of reducing fuel cost and congestion which is vital for the environment and seen by their customers and the government as Eco-friendly. The Group is trying to move this debate on and has continue to work with stakeholders to highlight the cost and environmental benefits of its pay -as- you- go model .

Operating in the transport and distribution sector, the Group is subject to a number of areas of legislation and regulations such as working time, health and fuel costs and environment, which can have an impact on a number of operational areas, as they are working within these constraints through the introduction of appropriate systems and controls.

According to R, Banonyomg of Thammasal University, Thailand and A.K.C Beresford of Cardiff University, UK (emeraldinsight.com) .The choices of multimodal transport combinations are based on factors other than just transportation costs, which are directly related to transit time, distance, and intermodal transfer. Other issues such as the nature of freight, cargo value-density, marketing strategy, stockholding policy, risk of damage and pilferage, packing requirement, security, etc, can be at least and as important factors that will have impact on the Group's business. But with its aims to become UK's leading provider of multimodal logistics solutions, it can also explore other factors that can have significant impact on the business e.g. by harnessing the skills of their loyal and committed workforce, the satisfaction of its customers and confidence of its investors, also the quality of its people, with a strong and recognisable brand and their industry leading management systems.

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Micro Business Environment

With the notoriously hard-pressed haulage sector, the iconic Group's name Eddie Stobart is one of the brand's greatest strengths. With its highly competitive pricing and renowned levels of customer service and efficiency, and combined with 95 per cent brand recognition throughout the UK, the Group have ensured that Stobart is not only keeping pace, but it's also expanding and increasing in