The original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of the physical product pass on the responsibilities to their customers to maintain their products through their life cycle (Amaya, et al., 2014, pp. 283-287), from product stand-by, product usage and maintenance after the end of the warranty period. …show more content…
Market Analysis
Market analysis is essential to better understand and explain the market needs, growth and trends that can have an influence on the business. The below table captures the SWOT analysis of the business, while the following paragraphs mention some of the main element from the SWOT analysis.
3.1. Strengths
The business is local, the major OEM suppliers are situated in the major capital cities, where they have exposure to more customer bases. However, this means a lack of specialised support exists in the regional areas for their products leaving customers feeling abandoned.
3.2. Weakness
Since a service cannot be sampled before a purchase (Kotler, et al., 2013, p. 454), combined with the fact that the services are performed on expensive capital equipment that require (Erkoyuncu, et al., 2013, p. 6296) reliable expertise, new customers worry about additional costs due to product downtime and service reliability. This presents a weakness for the business and limits its customer base in the mining segment. Therefore, to counter the intangibility of a service the business needs to communicate its capabilities through its facilities (Kotler, et al., 2013, p. 456), systems and customer interactions.
3.3. …show more content…
Objectives
One of the major goals for the business is to increase sales volume by offering the business services to a wider customer base. This can be done by offering services to OEM’s to cover warranty periods. In addition offer preventative maintenance services which increases the life of the product, but provides regular sales and could promote more brand awareness. Consequently, the business aims to secure an alignment with one major OEM and add another client to its preventative maintenance clientele within the next twelve months.
The business can gain market share if it works to include more mining industry clients. Presently only six are serviced. Due to the lack of such services in the past the mining segment provides for these services in-house. The business hopes to alleviate this by ensuring it complies with the current Australian Safety and Quality Standards. For that reason, the business will aim to have Safety accreditation completed in the next six months and Quality accreditations completed within twelve months.
Due to the business trying to ensure it survives the first twelve months, its pricing focused on the growth (Kotler, et al., 2013, p. 495) of its customer base and building brand awareness. This can sacrifices profit for market share. The next major goal is to ensure the business breaks even each month and moves towards making a profit every month of at least ten