PORTERS 5 FORCES ARTICLE for ABM INDUSTIRES, INC
You should start by doing some initial research on both your company and its
industry. This is a research analysis paper so you will need outside sources.
Do not depend solely on the company website, Yahoo finance, or Wikipedia.
Those are NOT legitimate business or academic sources. Use the library
electronic databases including Business Source Complete and Mergent
Online. Hopefully you have used these sources at this point in your graduate
studies. The library staff is available to assist you as well. Other good
sources include the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Business Week. You
should have at least 6 quality sources besides the Porter article and the
company website.
The Paper:
You will be applying the Porter 5-forces model to this company in its industry.
In preparation for writing the paper, review the guidelines and the grading
rubric in the syllabus.
Carefully read the Porter article itself. You should use at least two of the
criteria for each of the five forces to establish the strength (high or low) of
each force. The article identifies many factors for each force that contributes
to the competitive level in the industry and/or strength of any of the five forces.
Here are some tips for writing a successful paper:
1.
Students who do better than others on this paper take the time to study
the Porter paper itself.
2.
In addition, they carefully follow the guidelines listed in the syllabus and the
grading rubric.
3.
4.
Write the paper, read, edit, and re-write.
It should be a struggle to fit your analysis into the five page limit,
meaning, you should have so much excellent analysis that you have to work
at getting it within the 5-page limit.
Please avoid fluff (i.e.: writing that fills the paper but doesn’t add value). Your
writing should be concise and pertinent, which is a characteristic of business
analysis. That is one of the purposes of this exercise, to strengthen your
business analysis writing skills.
This paper is NOT:
A SWOT analysis
A company description
A company financial report
A buy-sell recommendation
This paper is a business analysis paper, using published research but written
in your own words. The use of direct quotes should be minimal. Finding
relevant research for your company and industry will take time. I know the
temptation is to find six things and use them regardless of their relevancy to
this exercise. Try to avoid this: find articles that directly relate to the company,
industry, buyers, suppliers, and competition. It may take more time but will
strengthen your paper. Remember that the paper is due Sunday, November
22nd no later than midnight.
Hello, everyone. I wanted to touch base with
you to share a couple of thoughts on this week’s work.
Teacher’s Note:
First of all, you should be working on your Porter’s Five
Forces paper as it applies to your assigned company. One
thing that wasn’t made clear in the syllabus or in the
rubric was that you’re required to use at least two outside
references (other than the article) to support your paper.
There was also a question about the Five Forces graphic
that you need to include in the paper. That graphic should
highlight or summarize the analysis you provided in the
rest of the paper. Think of the graphic this way: if
someone only studied the graphic and hadn’t read the
rest of the paper, would they still get an idea of how my
company stacks up in terms of the five forces? If so, the
graphic achieved its purpose.
As always, be sure to follow APA guidelines when citing a
reference within the body of the paper and on your
Reference page.
You completed two decision rounds last week and you
have another one (Year 14) due by Thursday midnight.
Fortunately you don’t have a discussion board post this
week so you have more time to devote to the paper.
By now, you should be seeing the results of your strategy.
Having talked to other instructors of this course, it seems
that people who don’t achieve positive results either have
not studied all of the resources available to you (The
Player’s Guide, the online videos, etc) or they haven’t
developed a strategy and followed it through. The goal, of
course, is to help you begin to identify cause-and-effect
relationships between your decisions and the outcomes
you generate. If you put the time in, you should begin to
see positive results.
On a related matter, I’ve heard rumblings that some
people aren’t pulling their weight when it comes to
working with their teams. If you’ve been difficult to reach
or are not fully participating in your team discussions,
that’s not only unethical because the bulk of the work
falls on those who ARE participating but, in fact, could
very well drag the whole team down. This behavior
should also be reflected in your peer evaluation scores, so
please, we need everyone to be involved so you can be
as successful as possible.
We’ll hold our weekly Collaborate call Wednesday evening
at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. Most of you haven’t been on the call
(which is fine, since it’s voluntary) so if there is something
you feel you would benefit from that hasn’t been a part of
these calls, let me know. We’ll discuss the Porter paper
and this week’s readig tomorrow night and I’ll share some
of my observations on your year-to-date results.
I know the teams that are actively involved in this
simulation are learning a lot. Keep up the good work.
