Given that we are ultimately involved in a service oriented industry, providing the transportation of our nation’s goods, we must evaluate the way we do business from time to time. One way of doing this is with a SWOT analysis. Conducting a SWOT will help you evaluate the negatives and positives from within your organization, as well as the external factors affecting you. Each of the letters stand for something different in the analysis, so let’s jump right on into what they are.
We will begin with the internal factors involved in the SWOT analysis. The “S” in the acronym stands for “Strengths” and the “W” stands for “Weaknesses”. These two categories go hand-in-hand when deciding what internal factors led you to where you currently are. This may seem a little bit like tooting your own horn then shooting yourself in the foot, but it is an important part of figuring out what attributed to your successes and failures thus far. Be sure to include past experiences, physical resources, your human resources, as well as special processes you may have implemented. This area of the SWOT analysis is not only limited to internal opinion either. Be sure to incorporate how others may perceive these factors from the outside as well.
Once you have the internal strengths and weaknesses charted, you can now move on to the external factors. The “O” represents “Opportunities” and the “T” represents “Threats”. Naturally, in most businesses at least, the competition is going to be one of the most obvious external factors. It is more beneficial to think of this obvious point in a broader sense though. Try to think of the factors in detail that contribute to the competition being an external factor in this analysis. Include things such as trend forecasts, demographics, and legislation. This is just a small list to get the juices flowing, but your opportunities and threats can include many other categories specific to your type of operation.
Even a SWOT analysis seems relatively simple when the basic version is explained here, it can be done in several other formats, which can include more detailed data. The basic type of analysis I have described here can be useful in various situations. It is primarily designed to aid in identifying where a business or product excels and where improvement can be made. It is most effective in this manner when used to determine if a current course of action should remain in effect or be discontinued. You can tweak it in a different manner if deciding whether to implement future change of some kind into your current business strategy. At the least, it will become a tool to better let you know where you stand and what you can do to improve and become more successful.