Order 1110340: The Balanced Scorecard

The company under observation is Apple that deals in the creation of laptops and smartphone technology in the US, their mission statement is “Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad." This is to mainly show that as a company Apple has a commitment to ensuring that its customers that include students, teachers and program creators globally enjoy the best computing experience through their efficient and effective software and hardware. Their vision statement is “We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self- honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.” This is mainly to indicate the company believes in their capacity to withstand in the long run, through continued success and expansion.

The strategy applied by Apple has focused on differentiation of their products despite continual production on a yearly basis it is the same technology with minimal changes in software and design of the appearance. In this aspect, the iPhone can clearly be used as an example on a yearly basis a new design is released with some changes in the physical appearance yet minimal software differences. As per 2015, the shares of Apple sold made about $233,715, the dividends paid were about $11.4billion at about $0.57 per share. In 2016 there was about $ 213, 000 purchase in shares that resulted in dividends of about $12 billion being paid out by the company.2017 resulted in about $15billion in returns to investors in form of dividends, with an overall $25 billion revenue generated by the company. This indicates an increasing trend from the three years indicated continuously.

The key staff working in Apple are based in the marketing and technical positions, with the company dealing in manufacture of electronic devices there arises need for qualified staff to deal with the programming and engineering aspects while the requirement to sell more leads to the need also for a marketing team (Tomczak, Reinecke & Kuss, 2018). The human resource departments, therefore, have to come up with available voids in this sector before passing on the information on which department requires what employees in the company, this is to say that hiring of staff is depended on skills needed (Tarique, Briscoe & Schuler, 2015). The human resource in Apple is mainly focused on maximizing returns on investment in the hiring of staff, they are charged with the hiring, employee motivation and even improvement through training. The issue of customer relations has been greatly handled by Apple due to the setup of call centres to tackle consumer-related problems and this makes them loyal as well as advertisers of the company. At the bottom of Apple’s website there is a link that clearly tells the consumers to contact them in case of any problems or suggestions, the influence also that is attributed to their brand name makes them easily trustable by anyone, in this case, they are almost likened to wealth and so most individuals buy their products for recognition. Since Apple is operating as a global company in the provision of communication devices such as phones and laptops that bring the need to maximize transnational-networks, that are not limited by any boundaries or borders, the company in this aspect has done a lot of product differentiation to their commodities to attract a large market base, this is in itself a major information technology management strategy (Gandomi & Haider, 2015). The company also has come up with methods of monitoring the market and carrying out data retrieval as information is the key determinant of the success of Apple.

References

Gandomi, A., & Haider, M. (2015). Beyond the hype: Big data concepts, methods, and analytics. International Journal of Information Management, 35(2), 137-144.

Tarique, I., Briscoe, D. R., & Schuler, R. S. (2015). International human resource management: Policies and practices for multinational enterprises. Routledge.

Tomczak, T., Reinecke, S., & Kuss, A. (2018). Introduction. In Strategic Marketing (pp. 1-18). Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden.