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Crestwood Equity Partners SWOT Analysis / Matrix
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SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that can be used by Crestwood Equity Partners managers to do a situational analysis of the organization . It is a handy technique to understand the present Strengths (S), Weakness (W), Opportunities (O) & Threats (T) Crestwood Equity Partners is facing in its current business environment.
The Crestwood Equity Partners is one of the leading companies in its industry. Crestwood Equity Partners maintains its dominant position in market by carefully analyzing and reviewing the SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis a highly interactive process and requires effective coordination among various departments within the organization such as – marketing, finance, operations, management information systems and strategic planning.
The SWOT Analysis framework enables an organization to identify the internal strategic factors such as -strengths and weaknesses, & external strategic factors such as - opportunities and threats. It leads to a 2X2 matrix – also called SWOT Matrix.
The Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) Analysis / Matrix helps the managers of the Crestwood Equity Partners to develop four types of strategies:
- SO (strengths-opportunities) Strategies
- WO (weaknesses-opportunities) Strategies
- ST (strengths-threats) Strategies
- WT (weaknesses-threats) Strategies
SWOT Matrix Strategies Objective
The core purpose of SWOT matrix is to identify the strategies that a company can use to exploit external opportunities, counter threats, and build on & protect Crestwood Equity Partners strengths, and eradicate its weaknesses.
Step by Step Guide to Crestwood Equity Partners SWOT Analysis
Strengths of Crestwood Equity Partners – Internal Strategic Factors
As one of the leading organizations in its industry, Crestwood Equity Partners has numerous strengths that help it to thrive in the market place. These strengths not only help it to protect the market share in existing markets but also help in penetrating new markets. Based on Fern Fort University extensive research – some of the strengths of Crestwood Equity Partners are –
- Highly skilled workforce through successful training and learning programs. Crestwood Equity Partners is investing huge resources in training and development of its employees resulting in a workforce that is not only highly skilled but also motivated to achieve more.
- Strong Brand Portfolio – Over the years Crestwood Equity Partners has invested in building a strong brand portfolio. The SWOT analysis of Crestwood Equity Partners just underlines this fact. This brand portfolio can be extremely useful if the organization wants to expand into new product categories.
- Superb Performance in New Markets – Crestwood Equity Partners has built expertise at entering new markets and making success of them. The expansion has helped the organization to build new revenue stream and diversify the economic cycle risk in the markets it operates in.
- Strong dealer community – It has built a culture among distributor & dealers where the dealers not only promote company’s products but also invest in training the sales team to explain to the customer how he/she can extract the maximum benefits out of the products.
- Strong Free Cash Flow – Crestwood Equity Partners has strong free cash flows that provide resources in the hand of the company to expand into new projects.
- Good Returns on Capital Expenditure – Crestwood Equity Partners is relatively successful at execution of new projects and generated good returns on capital expenditure by building new revenue streams.
- Strong distribution network – Over the years Crestwood Equity Partners has built a reliable distribution network that can reach majority of its potential market.
- Automation of activities brought consistency of quality to Crestwood Equity Partners products and has enabled the company to scale up and scale down based on the demand conditions in the market.
Weakness of Crestwood Equity Partners – Internal Strategic Factors
Weakness are the areas where Crestwood Equity Partners can improve upon. Strategy is about making choices and weakness are the areas where an organization can improve using SWOT analysis and build on its competitive advantage and strategic positioning.
- The marketing of the products left a lot to be desired. Even though the product is a success in terms of sale but its positioning and unique selling proposition is not clearly defined which can lead to the attacks in this segment from the competitors.
- Organization structure is only compatible with present business model thus limiting expansion in adjacent product segments.
- The profitability ratio and Net Contribution % of Crestwood Equity Partners are below the industry average.
- The company has not being able to tackle the challenges present by the new entrants in the segment and has lost small market share in the niche categories. Crestwood Equity Partners has to build internal feedback mechanism directly from sales team on ground to counter these challenges.
- Need more investment in new technologies. Given the scale of expansion and different geographies the company is planning to expand into, Crestwood Equity Partners needs to put more money in technology to integrate the processes across the board. Right now the investment in technologies is not at par with the vision of the company.
- High attrition rate in work force – compare to other organizations in the industry Crestwood Equity Partners has a higher attrition rate and have to spend a lot more compare to its competitors on training and development of its employees.
- Not highly successful at integrating firms with different work culture. As mentioned earlier even though Crestwood Equity Partners is successful at integrating small companies it has its share of failure to merge firms that have different work culture.
Opportunities for Crestwood Equity Partners – External Strategic Factors
- The new technology provides an opportunity to Crestwood Equity Partners to practices differentiated pricing strategy in the new market. It will enable the firm to maintain its loyal customers with great service and lure new customers through other value oriented propositions.
- Lower inflation rate – The low inflation rate bring more stability in the market, enable credit at lower interest rate to the customers of Crestwood Equity Partners.
- The market development will lead to dilution of competitor’s advantage and enable Crestwood Equity Partners to increase its competitiveness compare to the other competitors.
- Decreasing cost of transportation because of lower shipping prices can also bring down the cost of Crestwood Equity Partners’s products thus providing an opportunity to the company - either to boost its profitability or pass on the benefits to the customers to gain market share.
- New trends in the consumer behavior can open up new market for the Crestwood Equity Partners . It provides a great opportunity for the organization to build new revenue streams and diversify into new product categories too.
- The new taxation policy can significantly impact the way of doing business and can open new opportunity for established players such as Crestwood Equity Partners to increase its profitability.
- Organization’s core competencies can be a success in similar other products field. A comparative example could be - GE healthcare research helped it in developing better Oil drilling machines.
- Government green drive also opens an opportunity for procurement of Crestwood Equity Partners products by the state as well as federal government contractors.
Threats Crestwood Equity Partners Facing - External Strategic Factors
- Liability laws in different countries are different and Crestwood Equity Partners may be exposed to various liability claims given change in policies in those markets.
- Changing consumer buying behavior from online channel could be a threat to the existing physical infrastructure driven supply chain model.
- Rising raw material can pose a threat to the Crestwood Equity Partners profitability.
- New environment regulations under Paris agreement (2016) could be a threat to certain existing product categories .
- Growing strengths of local distributors also presents a threat in some markets as the competition is paying higher margins to the local distributors.
- New technologies developed by the competitor or market disruptor could be a serious threat to the industry in medium to long term future.
- Shortage of skilled workforce in certain global market represents a threat to steady growth of profits for Crestwood Equity Partners in those markets.
- As the company is operating in numerous countries it is exposed to currency fluctuations especially given the volatile political climate in number of markets across the world.
Limitations of SWOT Analysis for Crestwood Equity Partners
Although the SWOT analysis is widely used as a strategic planning tool, the analysis does have its share of limitations.
- Certain capabilities or factors of an organization can be both a strength and weakness at the same time. This is one of the major limitations of SWOT analysis . For example changing environmental regulations can be both a threat to company it can also be an opportunity in a sense that it will enable the company to be on a level playing field or at advantage to competitors if it able to develop the products faster than the competitors.
- SWOT does not show how to achieve a competitive advantage, so it must not be an end in itself.
- The matrix is only a starting point for a discussion on how proposed strategies could be implemented. It provided an evaluation window but not an implementation plan based on strategic competitiveness of Crestwood Equity Partners
- SWOT is a static assessment - analysis of status quo with few prospective changes. As circumstances, capabilities, threats, and strategies change, the dynamics of a competitive environment may not be revealed in a single matrix.
- SWOT analysis may lead the firm to overemphasize a single internal or external factor in formulating strategies. There are interrelationships among the key internal and external factors that SWOT does not reveal that may be important in devising strategies.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Crestwood Equity Partners
In light of the above mentioned limitations of the SWOT analysis / matrix, corporate managers decided to provide weightage to each internal strength and weakness of the firm. Organizations also assess the likelihood of events taking place in the coming future and how strong their impact could be on company's performance.
This method is called Weighted SWOT analysis. It is better than doing simplistic SWOT analysis because with Weighted SWOT Analysis Crestwood Equity Partners managers can focus on the most critical factors and discount the non-important one. It also solves the long list problem where organizations ends up making a long list but none of the factors deemed too critical.
Limitation of Weighted SWOT analysis of Crestwood Equity Partners
This approach also suffers from one major drawback - it focus on individual importance of factor rather than how they are collectively important and impact the business holistically.
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Example of Weighted SWOT Analysis
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SWOT Worksheet & Template
If you like to do your own SWOT analysis or want to make your own Weighted SWOT SWOT matrix then feel free to download Fern Fort University SWOT Analysis Template.
References / Citations & Bibliography
- M. E. Porter, Competitive Strategy(New York: Free Press, 1980)
- A. D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962)
- O. E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies(New York: Free Press, 1975);
- L. Wrigley, Divisional Autonomy and Diversification (PhD, Harvard Business School, 1970)
- R. E. White, Generic Business Strategies, Organizational Context and Performance: An Empirical Investigation, Strategic Management Journal7 (1986)
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