Strategic Planning In Retailing: Cases from Thai Retailing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Preliminary desk researches suggested that strategic planing and management needs empirical evidence to broaden itsapplication to different industries, The purose of the study is to examine the practical framework for the plannng and development of strategy and strategic plans from the current practice of retail operations in Thailand. Theoretical reviews were carred out at early stage of the research on strategic decision making, planning systems, strategy and retailing to build a framework for research objectives and to form research questions. The main objective of the research is, therefore, to examine forms of strategy development process and the influence of marketing concepts to the planning processes of selected organisations. Fieldwork was planned to investigate at several modern retailers in Thailand, where retail competition has been intensive. Five retailers allowed their co-operation, and several methods of data collections, such as different types of interviews, observations and the analysis of achieval record, were employed to generate five case studies. The main conclusion drawn from the study would indicate that the term "strategic planning process", together with budgeting and long-range planning systems, are embedded in yearly periodical planning systems that react to external environment challenges only in the short term. The yearly periodical planing system together with an administrative system forms an on-going planning cycle. The strategic management process, on the other hand, is future-oriented planning process that has a time-span of more than a year. Strategic decisions generated by the strategic management process together with the outcome of other strategic decision-making are the inputs to both components of the on-going planning cycle. Therefore, short-term and long-term strategy development processes are distinct processes that require different approaches. However, the two processes are linked and both should be embedded within the overall strategic development process. The study also suggests that Thai retailers have to strengthen their strategy development process to be able to encourage learning and understanding of key business environments, business concepts and strategies before generating their own "winning formula". The outcome from the thesis is, therefore, a practical framework for the planning and development of strategy and strategic plans from the current practices of retail operations in Thailand that can be applied as a checklist for monitoring and evaluation in large-to-medium sized retailing organisations in similar trading environments.