Strategic Audits
Strategic audits refer to the auditing of a company’s business strategy. Strategic audits are very useful for keeping companies in balance financially, morally, and ethically. They are used to understand business plans. As management you need to be able to monitor every single aspect of the business or enterprise. The monitoring is not to happen once a year but to be kept on top of all year. According to Wheelen & Hunger, strategic audits “provide a checklist of questions, by area or issue that enables a systematic analysis to be made of various corporate functions and activities”. There is a very specific process that must be followed to enable a proper audit is completed. These steps are evaluation of current performance, environmental scanning, strategic formulation, strategic implementation, and evaluation and control. Strategic audits are types of management audit and are extremely useful as a diagnostic tool to pinpoint corporate wide problem areas and to highlight organizational strengths and weaknesses. Strategic audits can help determine why a certain area is creating problems and then helping to solve that problem and finding solutions. Audits are not all encompassing lists but there is a presentation of many questions needed for detailed analysis of business corporation. The questions asked might be inappropriate for specific companies but on the other hand, those same questions are insufficient for the completion of an analysis.
There is a six stage process that most strategic audits follow. These stages are Resource Analysis, Value Chain Analysis, Core Competence Analysis, Performance Analysis, Portfolio Analysis, and the SWOT ...