Abonet - Strategic Management

1. Introduction

Strategic management is the art and science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating processes that enable an organization to achieve its objectives. At the heart of strategic management lies the integration of management, marketing, finance, production operations, research and development with the aim of leading the organization to success. To enact a successful strategy, all these company activities must fit and complement each other in order to deliver value both to the firm and its customers.

“For the leading strategy guru, Michael Porter (1996), strategy is about achieving competitive advantage through being different– delivering a unique value added to the customer, having a clear and enactable view of how to position yourself uniquely in your industry".

In the present paper we have chosen company Abonet for the practical reason of emphasizing the main features of the strategic management implementation process.

2. General description of the company

Abonet is a company that offers services in web hosting, web advertising, domain name registration and web design. Founded in 2007, with the headquarters in Campina, Prahova County, by Emil Dico, the company managed to make a name in the web hosting and domain name registration market and shortly reached a turnover of approximately 150.000 Euros. The web design activity was added recently and the manager hopes that this will also manage to be very profitable and will help boosting the sales in the web hosting and domain name registration department.

ABONET ‘s most profitable activity is the web hosting one , monthly the company issues approximately 400 invoices per month just for that. The motto of the company is “dynamic, innovative, resourceful”- ABO

ABONET has eight employees: five in the web hosting area, two in the web design area and there is only one manager. The organizational structure is flat. Below is a representation of the organizational structure.

Figure 1 -Organizational Structure

Due to the fact that we deal with a flat organizational structure corresponding to a small company from the Romanian web hosting market, the line manager possesses not only both formal and informal authority, but also he takes all the major decisions in the company, all the other 7 employees having to report to him.

The revenues in the company are obtained from services such as web hosting, domain registration, web design and web advertising. Service packages vary according to facilities included, and are chosen by the customers depending on their particular needs. We will explain more detailed how the processes in the company work. The company has some server as assets, the web sites of different people being stocked on the hard drives. These servers also have a very strong Internet connection, in order to ensure this ABONET has partnerships with some of the biggest Internet providers in Romania. The clients of the company pay for the service of web hosting, sums which vary from 3,9$ to 39$, on a monthly basis, according to the service package the respective clients have chosen. ABONET also intermedies registration of domain names , this service is provided at a low cost mainly due to the fact that they are a direct partner of the institution which reglements this activity in Romania, the National Institute of R&D in Informatics.