Business Level Strategy

Introduction

Pulte Homes is a holding company whose subsidiaries engage in the homebuilding and financial services businesses. The company operates in the US. It is headquartered in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and employs about 5,300 people.

Business Level Strategies

Many people associate strategic management with strategic planning. This approach to strategy generally involves a deliberate step-by-step approach. A secondary reason for the popularity of strategic planning was the failure of diversification to increase profitability. In Pulte Homes corporate planning departments were dismantled and responsibility for strategy formulation passed to managers who had responsibility for its implementation. Pulte Homes produce strategic plans every year(Jacobs, 99). For Pulte Homes, this practice means they completely ignore their strategic plans when developing budgets. Strategic plans set the goals and direction. While budgets are short lived, compared to strategic and tactical plans, they are the windows into the planning process. As planning is part of the overall business process, the strategic and tactical plans must become living documents to obtain maximum value from the process, and prevent the planning process from becoming an isolated event. (SWAMIDASS, P.M. and NEWELL, W.T., 1987, 509-524), The planning process is the orchestration of resources to create a competitive advantage, and consequently, its pieces must not be isolated. The business process contains three segments - mission, implementation, and reward. The implementation segment, which contains the planning process, also has three elements - strategic, tactical, and perpetration.

Competitive Advantage

Quality

Pulte Homes has a competitive advantage of exceptional quality and customer service. Since its founding in 1950, Pulte Homes has maintained a steady focus on quality and customer satisfaction. Building the best quality home is a given(Jacobs, 99). But delivering the best home buying experience to every customer is an equal commitment. It's part of founder Bill Pulte's stated objective: Don't just satisfy our homebuyers.

Efficiency

Truly delight them to the point they become a Pulte homeowner for life. Pulte Homes is committed to delivering quality homes, both in the way our homes are built and in the preferred products we feature in them. During construction, we focus on creating an overall tight building envelope to maximize comfort and energy savings in the home(Jacobs, 99). Most homes are wrapped with Dow's WEATHERMATE Plus housewrap, which acts as a “jacket” to protect against air leakage and moisture intrusion.

Innovation

Pulte's “Signature Standards” program enables many buyers to enjoy the highest-quality products and finishes in their homes, by making the most sought-after features and brands standard and eliminating the need for price-inflating options(Jacobs, 99). Among the high-quality partners with whom Pulte enjoys national relationships and whose products add to the value of a Pulte home: General Electric appliances; Merillat cabinetry; Corian countertops; Moen and Kohler plumbing fixtures; Mohawk flooring; Schlage door hardware; Sherwin Williams paints and many more.

Analysis of Value Chain

To better understand the activities through which a Pulte Homes develops a competitive advantage and creates shareholder value, it is useful to separate the business system into a series of value-generating activities referred to as the value chain.

The goal of ...