Environmental Scan Paper

Abstract

New companies start-up every day and an important step to any company starting up is environmental scanning. This is the first step in a company's strategic management and is very important to any corporation. Environmental scanning is gathering information from the external and internal factors of the corporation. Amazon.com Incorporated and The Home Depot Incorporated are two corporations that excel in this aspect of business. Because environmental scanning is, not only a task in starting up a company, but a continuing process in a corporate life, a corporation has to continue to process and review environmental scans. Amazon.com has showed it is able to do this process with several programs to collect information from within and outside of the company. In addition, they are coming out with new processes and items, to improve customer and company associations. The Home Depot is also constantly scanning the environment, which is shown by the company's energy reduction program and its ability to expand into foreign markets. Both companies are at the top of their prospective markets and continue to improve, showing the importance of environmental scanning.

Environmental Scan Paper

Introduction

Environmental scanning is a process that enables decision makers understands the internal and external environments of a corporation in the market, then to translate this understanding into the corporation's planning and decision-making processes. Forward-thinking helps a corporation avoid internal or external surprises, whether they are good or bad ones. In addition, by completing environmental scanning a corporation is able to identify potential opportunities in the market. Two companies that utilize environmental scanning are Amazon.com Incorporated and The Home Depot.

Amazon.com Incorporated is an on-line company that started in 1995 and has grown into the world's largest on-line retailer (Internet Retailer, 2012) (The Gale Group, Inc., n.d.). Another company who uses environmental scanning is The Home Depot, Incorporated, Who started with two stores in 1978 and grew to the world's largest home improvement retailer (The Home Depot, 2012). The Home Depot is dependent upon the ability of its leaders and employees to adapt to rapidly transforming external environment (Wheelen & Hunter, 2010). This paper will use an environmental scan to evaluate the internal and external environments of Amazon.com Inc. and The Home Depot, Inc.

The external and internal factors that affect both corporations are addressed using STEEP analysis, which is broken down into five categories; social or cultural, technology, economic, ecological, and political or legal (Wheelen & Hunger, 2010). Starting out, the paper will determine what competitive