An overview of the strategy that the Starbucks coffee chain needs to adopt to stay afloat in today’s market.
This paper examines how, with today’s global marketplace, Starbucks faces three competing demands: maximize margins; ensure product performance; and comply with environmental regulations. To meet these demands, Starbucks is seeking process improvement that enables it to advance product quality and improve responsiveness to customer needs, while lowering costs. It also examines how, with the growing competition from other companies, Starbucks is increasingly taking a broader view of business processes, i.e., the interrelated activities, procedures, and behaviors that occur within and between organizational units, seeking to ensure the effectiveness of intra-organizational and inter-organizational processes.
“Starbucks also needs to address the question of waste as the company owns its operates its roasting plants. Even though Starbucks can control the quality of its coffee, there are the questions of waste in processing, since Starbucks does not have the expertise in processing industry. Since the initial emphasis of process improvement is directed at minimizing waste, reducing variance among interdependent activities, and eliminating redundancy, in the next phase Starbucks can raise the standards of its business processes. At this stage, Starbucks is not only attempting to prevent errors from occurring in the first place, but it strives to reach new standards of quality by upgrading quality and the capabilities of its processes.”