Dole Food Company, Essay Example

Question

Using a specific organization of your choice, work through the strategic drivers, assessing the degree to which each is relevant to the organization you have chosen. How well it is/is not taking advantage of the opportunity presented by each driver. Has the organization released an APP and if so, is it B2B, B2C and does it aid in / relate to accomplishing the any one or more drivers.?Any recommendations you can make as to how the organization should move forward in Internet space.

Company Background

Dole Food Company is an American based company dealing mainly in agricultural products. It has its headquarters in California, a place known as Westlake village. It is the largest producer of vegetables and fruits in the whole world. The company has employed over 74,300 people with Americans taking the largest number of employees. The company markets food items like pineapples, bananas, strawberries, grapes, salads and several other fruits and vegetables (Dole.com).

Missionaries, Amos Starr and Castle Samuel, founded Dole in 1851. Initially, it was known as Castle and Cooke Company. It served the role of road construction, shipping investment seafood packing and sugar production. Castle and Cooke Company merged with one of the newly formed company in Hawaii, Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1901. Hawaiian Pineapple Company had been formed James Dole (Dole.com). Castle and Cooke acquired the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1960 and renamed it the Dole Food Company. It is ranked the third largest producer and exporter of bananas in the US. In 2013, the company announced that it has sold itself to a CEO named Murdock for an approximated amount of $1.2billion (Dole.com). This company opposed the California Proposition 37 of 2012.

Dole Mobile App

With about more than 2 million monthly web sessions, Dole is choice target for any form of malicious activities that hackers might bring to its site. Keeping pace with the highly and rapidly increasing number of attacks has been somehow a big challenge to Dole (Dole Food Company). Due to this, its multiple web applications became particularly vulnerable to attacks. In order to offer protection to its website, Dole ensured that it used an app known as xyberShield whose role is mainly defending against the injection of the SQL, response of the HTTP as well as other several OWAP attacks. There are several benefits of xyberShield. It successfully recognized and stopped any form of attempted attacks. There were no additional burdens evidenced in infrastructure, personnel, or the company network performance. The app ensured the success of the online communication with the customers.

The primary Strategic Drivers

Taking into consideration that Dole has multiple retail stores across the world, online or rather, the internet type of business is not the basic method of doing business. Nonetheless, because of its brand, strong marketing, and safer online transactions, the company has managed to survive and maintained its top reputation as one of the best vegetable and fruit companies worldwide. In essence, the xyberShield security app is also an important reason for the success of the business (Dole Food Company).

Prevents competitors from taking advantage

The company online security system aids a lot in ensuring that any competitor of bringing down the internet operation is prevented from doing so. Any harm is easily detected. The app ensures continued business operations.

Protects the consumer information

With the current technology, many business operations are conducted online with many companies considering the creation of individual online portals for customers. With Dole, customers have their own portal with all their confidential details such as credit card numbers. With the app, it is not possible for a hacker to notice the database storing the customers’ information, leave alone accessing it (Dole Food Company Case Study).

Recommendation

In order to continue thriving in the food market, Dole Company has to make some improvements in its operations. First, the company should increase its customer loyalty by offering them some bonuses in case of large purchases. Discounts are also important to any business. In other words, the company should major most in its sales promotion to beat its competitors like PepsiCo and General Mills.

References

Dole Food Company. Dole Food Company Defends its online brand. From: https://www.xybershield.com/Portals/0/xyberShield%20Collateral/Dole%20Case%20Study.pdf

Dole Food Company Case Study. Dole teams up with Compuware for proactive problem resolution. From: http://www.compuware.com/content/dam/compuware/apm/assets/pdfs/CS_Dole.pdf

Dole.com. Dole Food Company. From: http://www.dole.com/