Fuzzy Logic approach to corporate strategy mapping

Corporate strategy mapping involves an analysis of company´s present situation based on strategic factors known as SWOT factors that represent Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The company survival analysis aims to forecast appropriate strategies to undertake. For this purpose, Internal-External Matrix (I-E Matrix) is used to map a company´s external and internal factors´ scores to determine the overall corporate strategy of a company. Based on both scores, IE matrix recommends a company with three types of strategy; Grow and Build, Hold and Maintain, and Harvest and Divest. In allocating the strategies, there are regions whereby the coordinates of mapped IFA and EFA scores are not able to immediately indicate the appropriate strategy to be undertaken by a company. When such cases arise, an analyst opinion is required in order to determine which strategy implementation is most appropriate. Different analyst may provide different opinion based on his or her assumption, `market driven´ or `resource-based´. There is no exact solution for the scores that fall in the ambiguous regions. As a solution, one possible approach is to integrate Fuzzy Logic technique with I-E Matrix in producing the automatic strategy formulation. This is due to the fact that Fuzzy Logic has shown to have ability to improve the intelligence of systems on uncertain, imprecise and noisy environment. In this study, Fuzzy Logic has been developed and tested on real cases data. The result shows that the proposed technique is able to forecast the strategic choice for the ambiguous locations that exists in the company.