Business Report Essay Sample about Amazon

The company I have decided to do my report on is Amazon. Amazon is a successful company because of the strategies they use, how adaptable they are to the ever-changing market, how they train their employees, and how the company respects their customers. The company was started in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, after graduating from Princeton with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he undertook a series of jobs before joining the New York investment bank, D. E. Shaw & Co. in 1990. Not long after, Bezos became the senior vice president and to this day he is the youngest to ever do so. Amazon’s big key to success is that they focus on the long term, not the short term. Amazon started off as an online bookstore and they quickly became the top leader in e-commerce with the website being open 24 hours a day. One of the biggest problems that Bezos faced was staying relevant with the internet because the internet was brand new so there were many things yet to be discovered. The site was user-friendly and encouraged customer reviews which builds trust.  According to the Harvard business review, 83 percent of people trust the word of a friend. But perhaps one of the more interesting points is that the number who trust consumer reviews by people they never met on a retailer’s site. When the demand for more online stores and diversity, Amazon offered a vast variety of products, including customer electronics, apparel, and hardware. Amazon differentiated themselves even further in 2006 by introducing Amazon web services, the cloud computing service that eventually became the largest service in the world. In 2007, amazon came out with the Kindle, which gave customers the ability to connect to the internet and buy books and movies and even shop remotely. A quote from jeff Bezos says, “We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees”. This explains how much patience he has and how that can translate into the company easily. That can be a problem for any company is having the patience to maintain what you are doing and to visualize it actually working out. It took nearly two decades for amazon to maximize their profits. In 1995, their profits were $510,000 and it jumped to $600 million in 1998. 20 years later, their revenue was $233 billion. To have the patience he had to be able to make that much and stay relevant 20 years down the road is incredible. The reason why amazon has stayed so relevant is because of the companies fact-based decision making. These examples are just a couple of reasons amazon is successful, they know what decision they are trying to make. Jeff also says that you really only need 70 percent of the information. “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” (INC). These decisions are important in a business because any decision you make is technically a big risk. You never know what is truly best for your business until you test things out and if they are going to work out or not. another discipline Bezos believes in is disagree and commit. Healthy disagreement is essential for excavating and evaluating a full range of ideas, but infighting can also slow down implementation of whatever is decided. The last one is to quickly escalate deep disagreements. “Recognizing true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views, they are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion.”, says Bezos. These are important because these are the values that makes amazon so successful, and we can use them in any situation. These are not just business strategies, they are life strategies, and the way Bezos uses them, his employees can adopt them to use on their own. Another reason amazon is thriving is because of how they train their employees. This is important because employees are more than just the backbone of a company, they make the owner the money and keep the business operating functionally. Amazon trains their employees life skills and opportunities to further their education. Amazons’ big thing right now is upskilling 2025 which is a program for amazon employees. Amazon is investing more than $1.2 billion to provide free upskilling opportunities to more than 300,000 U.S. employees, helping them further their careers in high-paying, in-demand roles. Through the company’s popular career choice program, the company will fund full college tuition as well as high school diplomas, GED’s, and ESL proficiency certifications for its front-line employees, in addition to employees who have been with the company for at least three months. Amazon is also adding three new education programs to provide employees with the opportunity to learn skills within data center maintenance and technology, IT, and user experience and research design. These are important because it creates benefits for the employee which makes them want to stay. Amazon’s manufacturing is above average, they focus on optimizing your factory operations, not on the infrastructure needed to make it happen. As I mentioned earlier, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, distributes billions of products using cutting edge automation, machine learning and AI, and robotics. The main benefits of AWS are that it improves quality. Manufacturing companies collect vast amounts of process data but common issues such as disparate data sources, stranded data and ownership issues make it difficult to identify insights. Amazon web services also reduce downtime and enhance security. it reduces downtime because they combine Silo’d machine data across lines, and plants in a common data lake, and leverage GreenGrass, machine learning and AI to provide real time and predictive analytics on your production equipment. Cloud security at AWS is priority number one. As a customer of AWS, you would benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. These are crucial nowadays because of how easy it is to hack into a software system. One of the biggest reasons Amazon is successful is because of how much they value the customer satisfaction relationship. Amazon prime day is a good example of why they value customer satisfaction. Amazon prime day began in July 2015 in honor of the website’s 20th anniversary, and it has taken place ever since. Amazon prime day is an event when items are heavily discounted for two days straight in order to mass sell items. Another reason amazon is one of the top companies for customer satisfaction is because of the delivery and return options they offer. The delivery options start with free shipping on all deliveries for orders that are more than 25$. For $119 a year, Amazon prime customers have the opportunity to get free shipping on every product they order. Another easier option is an amazon locker. This is a place where you can have something delivered for easy pickup access. Amazon has entered the brick-and-mortar business by creating Amazon Bookstores, Amazon Go, a checkout-less grocery store, and purchasing Whole Foods in order to provide immediate access in key markets for customers who are excited about the frictionless Amazon shopping experience but, require faster access to goods. Amazon has very good product experience also. Amazons unique searchability factor allows a google-like ability to search with an ability to sort by brand, average customer review, price, and availability, as well as specific brands. Amazon also provides product education. To help you decide on a product, Amazon provides the ability to learn more about how your product meets your needs. primarily through reviews and ratings, customers can get live feedback about if a product was useful and how it should be used. These are important because as a business owner or even manager, the customer should be priority number one. Bezos’ approach is to never lose the importance of customer satisfaction and amazon narrows in on eliminating the risk of unsatisfied customers.