Strategic business area

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Under a strategic business area is understood in business , a business area with products / services - market combinations for which specific strategies should be developed.

General

The business enterprise derived from the specified purpose of the company and the business objectives from. The management organization is inter alia the task to identify the most important business areas for the company from all business areas and to subject them to a strategic planning. These are always organizational units that are directly related to the market and customers that a company serves as a provider . While operational planning is usually sufficient for normal business areas , strategic business areas always require strategic planning .

History of origin

In the specialist literature it is controversial whether the strategic business area (SGF) and the strategic business unit (SGE) are synonyms or not. For Karl Mauthe, an SBU is as isolated as possible an “excerpt from the company's entire field of activity, for which a relatively independent strategic program can be planned”. Hans H. Hinterhuber sees an SGF as a "homogeneous area of ​​activity in which a strategic business unit can exploit the company's strengths". Both authors use SGF and SGE largely synonymously. In 1979, Aloys Gälweiler defined the SGF as “a conceptual construction, an aid for intellectual work that aims to improve the long-term management of the company”. He used the expression SGE in the sense of an SGF. Jörg Link, on the other hand, differentiates between the two terms and sees the SGF as an abstract object of the company's original system, while the SGE represents internal organizational units. Another part of the literature wants to combine several SBUs into one SGF.

The Anglo-American literature clearly distinguishes between the SGE ( English strategic business unit , SBU) and the SGF ( English strategic business area , SBA). The idea of ​​creating business fields arose from the problem of managing several, possibly very heterogeneous products, which is typical for multi- product companies. General Electric had 170 product departments, which in 1971 it grouped together to form factually related product groups within a SBU, which enabled it to use synergies within the products. This resulted in 43 SBUs, which the group settled on the level where strategic business decisions were also made.

tasks

Following this, a distinction is made here between the SGE and the SGF. While the SGE represents an organizational unit in the company with its own market development, the SGF is a sub-market that the company understands as an exogenous factor ( environmental status ) and requires the company to design the product or service in line with the market. Separate competitive strategies are required for each of these sub-markets . The SGE / SGF deal with homogeneous groups of products / services that are offered to an identifiable customer group and / or core products that give the company and secure competitive advantages over competitors . The strategic positioning is the central task at the SGE / SGF.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl D. Mauthe, Strategische Analyze , 1984, p. 183
  2. ^ Hans H. Hinterhuber, Strategische Unternehmensführung , Volume I, 1992, p. 73
  3. ↑ Aloys Gälweiler, Strategic Business Units (SGE) and Structure and Organization of the Company , in: Journal for Organization, Volume 48, 1979, p. 253
  4. ↑ Jörg Link, Organization of strategic planning , 1985, p. 51 f.
  5. ↑ Herman Vice, in: Business Week, 1972, pp. 52 ff.
  6. ^ Rolf Bühner, Betriebswirtschaftliche Organizationlehre , 2004, p. 209