General Electric Healthcare Strategic Analysis

GE Healthcare is a business unit of General Electric. It is involved in providing transformational medical technologies and services that are aimed at meeting the increasing demand for access to quality and affordable healthcare globally. General Electric, 2015) GE Healthcare’s services include biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, medical imaging, patient monitoring and diagnostic to drug discovery, software and IT, performance improvement solutions and most recently the company has ventured into finding how AI can be used to improve healthcare provision (GE Healthcare, 2018). This paper will evaluate the strategic positioning of GE Healthcare, its resources and value systems, product/portfolio mix and the key future directions that the comedy will take to enable it achieve strategic growth. Strategic positioning of General Electric Health Care The Institute for strategy and competitiveness (2018), provides that strategic positioning is tool of business strategy that organizations use to ensure that their performance is superior within their industry.

Based on this framework, Thompson (2017) established that GE’s main differentiation strategy is to achieve a competitive edge over its close competitors. GE offers unique and authentic products to help attract its customers. This is reflected in the high number of patents the company owns. In addition, this is also reflected in the several number of subsidiaries that GE Healthcare has which offer their unique products and services. They include GE Healthcare Surgery, GE Healthcare Clinical Systems, GE Healthcare Integrated IT solutions, GE Healthcare Life Sciences and GE Healthcare Medical Diagnostics (GE Healthcare, 2018). GE Healthcare’s Tangible resources include its buildings, equipment and inventory, the financial resources of the organization that include its capital structure, working capital, creditors and debtors, receivables, bankers and debentures among many more. On the other hand, the intangible resources include its Human resources.

It also includes the company’s goodwill and brand image, customer loyalty, as well as the quality of its service and general reliability (MoneyMatters, 2018). By using the VRIO framework, it is possible to determine the outcomes of resources of an organization towards providing a competitive advantage. The VRIO will establish whether the resources are valuable, rare, high cost to imitate/imperfectly imitable and organized to capture (Jurevicius, 2013). Value Systems In business ethics, values are integral requirement. This is because values define what an organization stands for and the reason of existence. Value systems have a critical role in the collective networks within a company since they help in the determining the decision making process in a process as well as the behaviors of the staff in an organization. Values serve as a strategic tool that gives a model that enables the systematic evaluation of the activities of an organization as well as how well they relate.

Moreover, an organization’s values also include its intangible resources such as brand equity, competence and leadership (Greco, Cricelli, & Grimaldi, 2013). For example at GE Healthcare, the sales and finance departments at the organizations’ headquarters handle the organizations high level decision. On the other hand, its global sourcing department takes care of all the purchasing in the firm (GE Healthcare, 2018). In addition, the human resources include hiring, training, and motivation of the staff. GE Healthcare has nearly 46,000 staffs that are spread across 100 countries (GE Healthcare, 2018). Due to this, the organization’s Human resource department is committed towards the development of a strong workforce within the organization that would adapt with ease to the global changing needs. Therefore, the analysis of an organization’s product portfolio helps to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and implementation (The Forbes Group, 2018).

Product portfolio analysis assists organizations to assess the success levels of their products as well as identify growth opportunities in the future besides recognizing profitability opportunities (Smartsheet, 2018). In addition, it can also help in detecting potential risks that an organization may face. Product portfolio analysis is important in management since it stems from the fact that individual products have different strategies and different financial cost. For example, a product with growing sales in an emergent market will not be handled the same as a low volume product in a shrinking market. The matrix has four categories that include the cows, the dogs, the stars and the questions marks. The BCG matrix is represented in the figure below. The BCG matrix Retrieved from: Martin(2015). GE Healthcare BCG Matrix In general, the GE Healthcare Unit as a whole realized a revenue growth of 5% and margins by 70 basis points.

Healthcare systems realized increased revenues by 10% and Life sciences revenues were up by 11%. Internal growth strategy refers to a strategic plan of growth is based on the internal resources of an organization whereas external growth uses other organization’s resources to realize growth. The figure below shows growth strategies as provided by Kumar (2016). Retrieved from Kumar, D.   GE Healthcare has made use of expansion as an internal growth strategy. Expansion can be in form of market or product expansion. Conclusions and Recommendations Based on the findings of this study, differentiation strategy stands as the strategic positioning of GE Healthcare. The organization also has valuable, rare and unique resources that are difficult to imitate and have been organized to capture value within the industry. In addition, GE Healthcare has also invested heavily in innovation which is proven by their ability to offer technologically driven solutions to healthcare provides.

Due to this, the company has succeeded within the healthcare industry and it has been able to continuously meet the growing market demands as driven by the fast changing technology. Based on the BCG matrix, these solutions are GE Healthcare’s stars. xls. com/en105 (Accessed April 18, 2018) GE First Quarter Results (2018). GE Announces First Quarter 2018 Results. Retrieved from https://www. ge. Cricelli, L. Grimaldi, M. A strategic management framework of tangible and intangible assets.  European Management Journal, 31(1), 55-66. Jurevicius.  Enterprise growth strategy: vision, planning and execution. Routledge. Managing Research Library. Value System. Available at https://managingresearchlibrary. azcentral. com/internal-external-business-growth-strategies-17598. html (Accessed April 17, 2018) Smartsheet (2018). The Definitive guide to Product Portfolio Management. Available at https://www. forbesgroup. com/inner. iml?mdl=toolbox. mdl&ToolID=4 (Accessed April 15, 2018) Thompson. A.