Functional Strategy

Functional Strategy Every Corporate develops `Functional Strategy` for each of its major departments. These are –

• Marketing strategy
• financial strategy
• research & development strategy
• Operations strategy
• purchasing strategy
• logistics strategy
• human resources strategy
• Information technology strategy

Functional Strategy makes you look at how are you going to implement the strategies and accomplish the goals of the organization? Functional Strategy is the final level of strategy developed by the major functional departments... These are action plans. They achieve the business strategies of the organization through the above departments. Functional Strategy harnesses the activities, skills and resources available. Functional Strategy primarily coordinates the functional areas of the corporate, so that each area upholds and contributes to individual business level strategy and to the overall corporate level strategy. This involves coordinating the various functions and operations needed to design, manufacture, delivery and support the product or service of each business within the organization. Functional Strategy is mainly concerned with -

• making efficient use of specialists with the functional area,
• integrating activities with functional area – coordinating advertising, promotion, and marketing resources in marketing, or purchasing, inventory control, and shipping in productions and operations,
• assuring that the functional strategy mesh with the business level strategies and the corporate level strategies.

Timing is another area of importance in functional strategy. For instance, the advertisement of a new product for market introduction well ahead, planning the production schedule accordingly, purchase of raw material for production in time, delivery schedule to the distributors and retailers, all these have to be coordinated and timed in perfect unison. The Functional Strategy has shorter time duration to act in comparison to either business level or corporate level strategies. Responsibility to `accountability` is also easily fixed in Functional Strategy, because actions occur sooner and more easily attributed to the function than is possible at other levels of strategy. In this, lower level managers are more directly involved with the implementation of Functional Strategy. Functional Strategy supports both market definition of the corporate strategy and also the market navigation of the business strategy as shown below:-

Integrated functional level strategies, in fact, help the business level and corporate level strategies to accomplish the organizational objectives.