Assume your group has been engaged by Foleo Group Limited as a team of consultants. At your initial meeting with the Board, your team has been asked to propose an initiative that will expand the current operations of the Foleo organisation as a whole, by recommending a new business to add to the current group of businesses. This project will require extensive research into the industry in which the proposed new business will operate, in addition to Foleo Groups current market. The long-term objectives of the Foleo Group of businesses revolve around growth, stakeholders and technology and can be summed up in the following 4 dot points: o We aim to grow each business by at least 8 per cent per annum over the next decade. o We aim to put our customers needs first to do that we will foster good relationships with them, our suppliers and our employees. o We aim to use and provide the most up-to-date technology available to ensure our customers receive the best product possible at the lowest price. o We aim to provide a working environment for our employees that encourages and facilitates

The operations of our Finance Department revolve around the collection, analysis and reporting of financial data relating to the transactional information generated by the various departments and business units. The reports they generate are disseminated across the organisation, but predominately support the Board and Business Unit Managers. Whilst we have set up this Department as a profit centre, they rarely produce any profit, in fact, they seldom even break even. This is because charging the internal business and departments anything more than a token price for processing data and generating reports, it is unsustainable. Therefore the primary focus for Finance is on meeting the managers demands for quality information in a timely manner at the lowest cost possible. Consequently, introducing the ROI measure for performance for this Department has not been a successful strategy. The operational staff of this department aim to process all transactional data on a timely basis to ensure the various reports are provided as and when they are required by the managers who rely upon them. They use a range of techniques to minimise the processing time of the data, which supports the cost minimisation focus of the department. For the most part, these techniques result in timely reporting, however at year-end and other peak times, there always seem to be problems delivering the required reports on time

The Marketing operational staff aim to produce creative promotional materials for the Foleo businesses for the lowest cost possible. This however, is not always achievable. There are regular and significant blow-outs in the costs associated with advertising and press releases, which are absorbed by the Department. This would indicate that the business process of estimating campaign costs is seriously flawed. Further investigation into the operations and management of this Department is recommended

The operational R&D staff appear to be genuinely enthused by the various projects being undertaken at present. Their workspaces are individual and creative, which, according to those I spoke to, encourages innovation. Alarmingly, there appears to be no consciousness of cost within this Department at all, not from management, not from administrative workers, and not from those employees building prototypes. This may explain why R&D has been unable to recover their costs from the revenue they generate from the other Foleo business units.

H.R. are responsible for providing a variety of services to all the Foleo departments and business units. These services range from payroll and recruitment to policy formulation and implementation. Specifically, they process the wages and salaries for over 2,000 employees across Australia and also, New Zealand; they assist business units in preparing job descriptions for existing and prospective staff members and conduct the entire recruitment process for all new personnel; and they are responsible for the initial orientation and training of new employees, which includes guiding them through the Foleo procedure manual, a policy H.R. implemented over a decade ago.

Strategic alignment: An explanation of the strategic alignment of the proposed initiative. This section should include: i. an identification of the long-term objectives of Foleo Group and how the proposed initiative will align with these, and ii. an identification and explanation of the proposed generic competitive strategy of the new business.