AJ Transportation Services, LLC located in Atlanta, GA is an Up and Comer, multi-regional trucking company which offers transportation services to residents of Atlanta, GA. AJ Transportation Services, LLC offers five multimodal transportations services such as flatbed owner operator, reefer owner operator, car hauler owner operator, tanker owner operator and cattle and livestock owner operator. The company’s vision is “to become one of the most preferred choices for both large and small organisations when it comes to demand for trucking services, and to make supply chain management an integral part of our strategy”. The company’s mission encompasses ensuring that the company forges a long-term relationship with its key customers. In achieving the mission, there is a need for the company to attract and retain its clients through the provision of the most effective transport solutions in Atlanta. By effectively designing strategies to manage employees to achieve the company’s vision and mission, AJ Transportation Services, LLC will create, gain and sustain a competitive advantage in the transportation industry.
Utilising human resources effectively in a given company is the best way of maintaining a competitive advantage in the industry. In today’s fast-paced economy, companies’ services and products thrive in a competitive business environment. AJ Transportation Services, LLC has to direct much attention to better service delivery by effectively managing employees and other external stakeholders. According to Child (1997), business firms/entities are regarded as cohesive organisms, which learns the effective ways of adopting or finding better strategies to achieve its vision and mission in response to the environment. Child, J. (1997). AJ Transportation Services, LLC has to do much to optimise or maintain its competitive advantage in the current transportation industry. The company, therefore, can focus on financial strategies, technology or human resources to maintain a competitive advantage in the current market. Since the company’s mission is focused on establishing good customer relations by having a skilled and competent workforce, the human resource strategy for developing, maintaining, and sustaining a competitive advantage for the company deem necessary.
A concise understanding and analysis of the company’s mission, vision and strategic objectives about the company’s employees is necessary as a tool for prior planning and implementation of human resource strategies for maintaining a competitive advantage in the transportation industry. According to Coff 1994, human resources are critical sources of a sustainable competitive advantage because of systematic information and causal ambiguity, and thus they are inimitable and non-substitutable. Perhaps what drives the employees of AJ Transportation Services, LLC is the kind of tasks or responsibilities that they are given to perform. Guest 1990 argues if the company’s management will trust their staff and provide them with challenging tasks, then the employees will respond with high performance, high commitment, and high motivation. One of the most critical objectives of AJ Transportation Services, LLC to ensure that they employ and recruit the best employees, invest in the most paying resources, and also a plan for remaining a leading global organization that is highly respected for its effectiveness, employees’ professionalism, management and vision attainment. Perhaps the company should even invest more in recruiting highly skilled employees who will be able to take and accomplish the company’s critical tasks which will translate to effectiveness in service delivery, and eventually, the company will be able to maintain its position in the competitive transportation industry.
AJ Transportation Services, LLC need to understand its position in the current transportation industry as far as customer satisfaction, and employees’ commitments towards the attainment of its goals are concerned. According to Porter 1985, a company’s competitive strategy is the positioning of the firm in its competitive market. The company cannot understand its position in the current transportation industry if it has not done a concise analysis of the company’s strengths, weakness, threats and opportunities. The company also needs to determine the critical success factors, and also perform a competitor analysis for the transportation industry. The critical success factors for AJ Transportation Services, LLC is dependent on the company’s services such as advertising, customer service, market penetration, location of stores, financial profit, research and development, employee dedication, customer loyalty, market share, product quality, top management and price competitiveness. Employee dedication is a critical success factor that is critical to the company. All the other success factors are determined by the effectiveness of achieving customer dedication in the company.
A SWOT analysis for the company also assists in determining the position of AJ Transportation Services, LLC in the current transportation industry in Atlanta. The company’s primary objectives include to achieve 100% on-time delivery of goods and services, stay up to date and innovative with the latest technology, and network with key people on all contracts. Also, the company aims to build a list of potential clients and real clients, establish a particular customer base by being honest and reliable, ensuring the project incurs a $100,000,000 revenue within the current financial year, and make the Commercial Carrier Journal(CCJ) appear in top 250. The company cannot achieve these objectives and maintain a competitive advantage if it doesn’t perform a concise SWOT analysis to determine its positions in the business arena. Considering employee’s satisfaction and dedication towards their work, AJ Transportation Services, LLC has a set of strengths and opportunities and also has weakness and threats. The company’s strengths include a high level of customer satisfaction, good returns on capital expenditure, strong distribution network, reliable suppliers, competitive rates, time commitments, marketing, strong brand portfolio, automation of activities and successful work tracking record.
The company’s weaknesses’ include a high attrition rate among the employees, organisational structure, lack of strategised planning, and economies of scales. The opportunities for the company’s employees include new environmental policies, new taxation policy, government green drive. New technologies and an increase in customer spending. The major threats that have direct a direct impact on the company’s staff and competitive advantage include Currency fluctuations, the external business environment and rising pay level movements such as $15 per hour. Therefore, AJ Transportation Services, LLC should remain cautious in the way it addresses issues touching on employees. As a strategy for maintaining a competitive advantage in the transportation industry, AJ Transportation Services, LLC should maximise its resources and times in addressing issues touching on the threats of the company. For instance, an increase in the payment amount to 15 dollars will increase the total payable amount to employees in the company’s inventory. If the company fails to comply with this payment law, then it will be at risk of losing skilled employees to their competitors and also those who will choose to will develop a negative organisational culture which will negatively affect the success of the company and hence the company will be less competitive in the transportation industry.
The behavioural perspective/the matching model is the best approach for AJ Transportation Services, LLC to maintain a competitive advantage through strategic Human Resource Management (HRM). Perhaps the struggle for gaining a competitive advantage in those markets that grow fiercely has radically changed the complexion of very many business entities. HRM theorist argues that employees should be identified as an origin of competitive advantage for any given company. According to Boxall 1992, the “matching model” or the “behavioral perspective” of HRM by Fomburn et al. (1994), asserts that the company’s success is dependent on a “tight-fit” between the business strategy and the HRM strategy. The fundamental idea of the matching model for attaining a competitive advantage is that human resource activities need to be associated with the company’s desired position in the industry. In other words, the company’s needs to work out what ‘behaviors’ are required for all the employees and adopt all the human resource practices that help reinforce those ‘behaviors’ for the well-being of the company.
Perhaps, AJ Transportation Services, LLC should choose whether it wants to be differentiators by superior non-price features such as service, delivery or excellent quality or cost leaders to maintain a competitive advantage in the transportation sector. For instance, the management needs to choose the differentiation strategy from competitors by higher levels of service and product innovation, and this will call for risk-oriented, co-operate and creative behaviour in the company. According to Schuler and Jackson (1989), the company’s human resource practices should include selection of skilled employees, give employees more discretion, make investments in HRM, provide resources for transport service experimentation, allowing and giving rewards to occasional employees based on their perfomance, and rewarding predictable employees’ behavior and high output as far as transportation services are concerned.
On the other hand, AJ Transportation Services, LLC can use the cost leadership strategy to create, maintain and sustain a competitive advantage in the transportation industry. Therefore, the company should design tasks that are highly repetitive, cut on the numbers of employees to the minimum, perform minimal training activities, reward high output and also reward good predictable employees’ behaviour. Perhaps the benefit and necessity of applying the matching model lies in the model’s simplicity and the ways the model constantly offers a ground for integrating HRM practices in the company. The diverse functions of HRM in the company are brought together around a common context of a conceptual framework in transportation, and this is the major outcome desired by the company’s management.
The capabilities model also provides strategies that AJ Transportation Services, LLC can use to attain a higher competitive advantage in the transport industry. The approach is associated with the resource base of the company. This resource-based approach gives a strategy of theorising the assistance of HR approach that does not solely depend on the reactive notions of the environmental positioning model. Wright et al. (1994) defines a company’s human resources as a pool of human capital which is under the company’s control, in a direct recruitment relationship. The company’s human resource base can be valued not only for its responsibility in implementing the company’s competitive scenario but for its solemn role in generating the company’s strategic capability, for its potential in creating services that are more flexible and intelligent than other competitors in the transport industry. The company need to develop talented staff and effectively ‘synergise’ their assistance within the resource bundle of the firm. The resource-based view in the company helps to lay the intellectual basis the ‘capabilities’ model of the strategic HRM. The capabilities model emphasises employee’s learning strategy for attaining a competitive advantage. Therefore, the company need to emphasise employees training, development and mentorship programs to foster professionalism in the organization if it wants to accomplish a higher competitive advantage.
AJ Transportation Services, LLC can also gain, sustain and maintain a higher competitive advantage by use of innovation, and partnership strategies. The company should decide on working with other transportation companies so that its employees can get direct access to the strategically essential skills resources or components that are necessary to facilitate innovation and change of the company’s operations. The company need to integrate its services with the partners and competitors in the supply chain to get exclusive access to potential suppliers and deciding on effective strategies for creating entry barriers to competitors in the transportation industry. The company can also choose to innovate and develop new services within the company to attain a higher competitive advantage. The company perhaps need to focus on product development program taking considerations on that feature that offers customers an exceptional benefit and value for their money. Those innovative features, in turn, will provide a substantial advantage since the competitors will find it challenging to give substitutes or imitate the services.
Therefore, AJ Transportation Services, LLC should focus on the unique performance of its operations to establish a competitive advantage. The company can decide to achieve its competitive edge by effectively managing both financial and human resources. The company should be a focus on utilising human resources effectively for it to attain and sustain a higher market share in the transport sector. Before the company manages its resources, it is necessary for the management to determine its position in the current market. Company’s position is attained through a concise analysis of competitors, SWOT analysis and an analysis of critical success factors for the company. The company, therefore, can use the capabilities model or the behavioural model to determine all the necessary strategies for creating, sustaining and maintaining a competitive advantage. The company also can adopt an innovation, customer experience, and partnership strategies to develop and maintain a higher competitive advantage in the transport sector.
References
Child, J. (1997). Strategic choice in the analysis of action, structure, organisations and environment: Retrospect and prospect. Organization Studies, 18(1), 43-76.
Coff, R. W. (1994). Human Assets and organization control: implication of the resource-based view. St. Louis: John M. Olin School of Business Washington University.
Fombrun, C. J. (1994). Leading corporate change: how the world's foremost companies are launching revolutionary change. McGraw-Hill Companies.
Guest, D. E. (1990). Human resource management and the American dream. Journal of Management Studies, 27(4), 377-397.
Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance. 1985. New York: FreePress, 43, 214.
Schuler, R. S., & Jackson, S. E. (1989). Determinants of human resource management priorities and implications for industrial relations. Journal of management, 15(1), 89-99.
Wright, P. M., McMahan, G. C., & McWilliams, A. (1994). Human resources and sustained competitive advantage: a resource-based perspective. International journal of human resource management, 5(2), 301-326.
