Mais Moving Company — SME Case Study (UAE)

The world has progressed a huge amount since innovation and computerized media made everything accessible with a solitary hit of the finger. This is a result of the Internet (Soegoto & Rushamidiwinata, 2018).

Moving family products and furniture has consistently been a major pressure when individuals need to change their area. Individuals think that it is hard to organize the vehicles and search for certain specialists who can help them with the moving and migration of their products.

Mais Movers unequivocally pass by the angle that worry ought to be considered while furnishing clients with their administration.

Mais Moving Company was established in 1990 in Sharjah, United Arab of Emirates. The owner is Ahmad Mais Moving Company Obaji, who is a Syrian citizen who moved to the UAE in 1989. In 2009, Safwan Mohammad Imam joined the company as a partner. The company is licenced under the Ministry of Labour. The Emirati sponsor is Amran Rashid Bu Afra. The company started working with only four employees. The owner, the accountant, and a team of two laborers who go to the site and transport the furniture are well qualified. Their administration incorporates getting the property together and shipping possessions to any site in the UAE. The organization can likewise give storerooms, and will coordinate the protected travel of every one of the clients’ things in the event that they are migrating to another Emirate or country (Jawabri, Rehman, & Alarmouti, 2019). The entirety of the staff are devoted experts who work securely to guarantee things shipped are kept in ideal condition. The workers get broad preparation in the moving business with the goal that clients can be certain about its capacity to address issues. It is a worldwide supplier of expulsion and moving administration. It is an organization with over 30 years of history which is profoundly knowledgeable about moving staff in open establishments and furnishes customers with affirmation that their move will be finished with the most significant level of value. The trucking organization works routinely with different public establishments, so it doesn’t own various structure contracts, but at the same time, can carry them out strategically.

The Mais Movers organization creates exhaustive cargo sending, project coordination, and migration administration plans custom-made to meet explicit necessities of clients. This is cultivated by learning client’s precise destinations with respect to their inward and outer necessities, hence guaranteeing that Mais Movers will offer quality types of assistance more reliably than some other specialist organization.

Vision Deliver the best moving effective, efficient services and be the most valued moving company to customers.

Mission Provide smart solutions to enhance business to all customers and create the best technology to serve the environment and community.

Organizational Structure

Mais Moving Company has a divisional organizational structure in which it has grouped every function of the organization into divisions, which correspond to geographies or products. Every division has the needed functions and resources inside for supporting that geography or product line. The divisional organizational structure is beneficial for the Mais Moving Company because if there is a failure in one division, the other divisions are not affected. Since the Mais Moving Company has different departments, the divisional organizational structure is the most suitable option for it. Each division handles its own issues, challenges, and problems and is not related to other divisions. This allows the company to stay organized (Inegbedion, Sunday, Asaleye, Lawal, & Adebanji, 2020). It provides easy decision making for the company since every division makes its own decisions and tends to provide quicker responses to the conditions of the local market and helps the company greatly in the market with high competition from other players.

CEO/ Executive/ Senior Management Finance and Administration Business Development Project Accounts Admin Human Resources Corporate Sales Marketing International Sales Residential Sales Project Sales Project Export Project Import Operating Plan Driver Division Warehouse Packer Division Operations Customer Services Figure 15: The Operational Strategy of Mais Moving Company Leadership Team The company was founded by Ahmad Obaji and he is the CEO and from Syria. The owner ensures delivering cost-effective moving solutions to customers nationally and internationally. The employees are mostly bilingual where they can speak English and Arabic fluently.

The organization gives inner and outer preparing and learning seminars consistently. Its exceptionally qualified packers have extra capabilities as circuit repairmen and woodworkers. All representatives have perpetual agreements. The leadership is in the hands of the CEO, who has hired a managing director, who is responsible for handling all the day-to-day activities of the company.

As it is a very small company with a limited number of employees, it does not require a lot of people in the management and can be solely done by one person (Alefari, Almanei, & Salonitis, 2020). The company has 15 employees from different nationalities (Philippines, Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan).

Just like every other business, the Mais Moving Company also faced some difficulties at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the situation was really intense. Air travel was banned, ports closed, and lockdowns were being imposed around the United Arab Emirates. The business started to slow down and the same happened for the Mais Moving Company. During this time, online shopping had reached a new high level, but the shipping industry was at a halt. During this time, Mais Moving Company came up with the idea of only taking domestic orders and no international orders. This resulted in an increase in orders from inside the United Arab Emirates. The company had completely shifted its focus towards the domestic market. There were no movement restrictions inside the country; therefore, it provided domestic services and decreased shipping time to increase the customer base.

Mais Moving Company provides a number of services.

As the name suggests, it mainly provides moving services, which includes the physical transportation of items between two points. Simply put, the company just moves the stuff. It provides specialized moving for valuable and fragile items, commercial moving, and residential moving. Secondly, it provides packing services before moving them. This service is for the clients who do not want to be in the hassle of packing and unpacking their stuff. Thirdly, Mais Moving Company provides storage services. It stores belongings of clients in its storage units and then transport them when and where they are needed. Mais Moving Company also specializes in delivery services. This includes picking the already ordered products of a client and delivering them to their location. Lastly, the company provides moving insurance for providing tensionless moving service to clients.

In order to have a competitive edge in the market, Mais Moving Company should have an effective business strategy. The business strategy provides the direction to accomplish organizational objectives. Mais Moving Company focuses at providing quick moving services in the United Arab Emirates. It is currently operating in Sharjah, but it is also exploring new markets. It is implementing a differentiation strategy by differentiating itself from the other moving companies.

It provides services of high quality, which can’t be matched by its rivals in the market. It has lower prices, which makes it cost efficient (Mehta & Bhavani, 2017).

Mais Moving Company is providing insurance to its clients for their belongings so that they remain worry free. The company is using different ways of penetrating the market and gradually gaining the market share.

Operating Strategy The operating strategy of Mais Moving Company is to operate collaboratively to gain competitive edge in the market. It provides a broad portfolio of services to its clients, which enables the company to meet different needs and requirements of clients. The company has established different departments for every service and has highly skilled experts, who carry out every task with full professionalism and with great care. It is operating in a market that is dominated by various big players; hence it is using different ways for overcoming them.

Mais Moving Company is operating domestically as well as internationally. It provides moving services to customers in the United Arab Emirates to move their belongings to any part of the world. It has a limited workforce, and it is increasing with time as its market share is increasing. This makes it cost efficient because it doesn’t hire more people than needed.

Mais Moving Company has an effective marketing strategy for attracting its clients towards its moving services. Since there is strong competition in the market, the company attracts its clients by providing them with discounts and promotions. For superseding its competitors, the promotion offers great discounts to every client on their next move and sometimes, offers free materials and tools for packing. The company uses social media as its main source of marketing. This is because it believes that social media is the best platform for spreading the word about the company. Social media platforms encourage the company to directly engage with its customers. It comes up with new innovative offers and packages for customers, which assists the company in attracting a lot more customers. The company focuses on the preferences of the customers and targets them on social media.

Mais Moving Company has faced a series of business challenges since its establishment. Since the United Arab Emirates has hot weather most of the time, the weather makes it hard for the workers to do the work.

Secondly, when the company receives a job for moving stuff, it works at full capacity, which does not give a margin for any kind. It makes it impossible to accomplish while operating a moving business where external situations influence a move. There are often situations when the trucks break down or the mover has sustained an injury. When the company is at full capacity, there isn’t the ability to recover from such issues. When the company works at its maximum, it might require help from external resources (Alkhateeb, 2017). It might have to hire a freelance driver or contract mover. There is a lot of risk in last minute replacements and there is a high chance to complicate issues they’re hired for solving.

For Mais Moving Company, customer service is the highest priority and it gives the utmost importance to giving full attention and care to the needs of customers.

Sometimes, while working at full capacity, the customer service is compromised and it suffers, which leads to a bad image of the company.

Solutions Mais Moving Company should ensure clear hearing requirements of customers and take measures for solving their needs. It is essential to have a team that is dedicated towards attending calls of customers and keeping them happy and informed about their orders. The company should avoid hiring any last minute external resources and only depend upon those removalists that are loyal to the company. It’s best to have a reservoir of drivers and movers, so that they can be pitched during emergencies. Notwithstanding the size of the contract, the company should keep at least 3% resources as backup, which ensures that it will do a good job for every customer that has hired the company. In addition, the company should take appropriate measures to tackle the weather of the region. The workers and drivers should have proper equipment for surviving in a sandstorm or to survive in extreme hot weather while moving.

Successful Best Practices

There are various things in the operations of the Mais Moving Company that can be considered as successful best practices. First of all, the boxes and other materials used in the packaging services of the company are made from recycled material. The company uses these materials because it believes in reducing the pollution caused by disposal of material. It uses packaging materials created from recycled material as a small step towards decreasing pollution. In addition, the company makes sure that it arrives at the customer’s destination with all the prepared paperwork and in order. The company always takes along extra material, in case some goes to waste or there is a need for more than the customer had ordered. This proves that the company focuses on professionalism and aims at providing great services to its clients. Before going to get the job done, the company does an in- house consultation, which enables it to get a look at inventory of the customer and see that they have made an accurate assessment.

The main failed practice of the Mais Moving Company is that it does not have enough of an online presence.

When a customer searches for the company, it cannot be found on the Internet. This reduces its chances of getting any orders from clients. Another failed practice of the company is that it is bad at managing its finances.

The company does not have a proper check and balance of the finances such as charges for services, operational costs, marketing expenditure, etc. A company known for the quality of services it offers has to maintain its quality or improve it with time. But in this case, the quality of service of the Mais Moving Company deteriorates in some orders, which is why it receives bad reviews and complaints. The company needs to maintain the level of quality of its services in order to survive or grow in the market.

Company as of Today If we compare the situation of the company now from what it used to be when it was established three decades ago, the company has shown huge growth in this period of time. The company has not grown much in terms of workforce and resources, but has gained a lot of market shares in the region. The company earned a great reputation in the market and has been giving tough competition to other companies in the market.

The company has been capable of maintaining the overall quality of its services and has focused mainly on the customer service and customer satisfaction. The company has expanded to various Emirati states and has been planning to expand even more, the result of which would be to enter new markets and gain more customers. In Sharjah, the company has a strong and loyal customer base that is growing with the passage of time. The company has won various awards in the industry and has made a place for itself among the big players in the market.

Mais Moving Company needs to develop an exciting and interesting movers website. It is completely pointless to enhance the marketing of the company without having a proper website. The company likewise needs to maintain and optimize a blog of the company on its website. This would provide the customers with the useful information related to relocations and they would certainly appreciate it. The company needs to build its reliability and reputability. The customers do not like uncertainty, mainly when it is about moving every possession in their home. The company should utilize social media platforms to the fullest extent (Ahmad, Bakar, & Ahmad, 2019). It should utilize the strength of social media to attract new customers. In addition, the company is required to focus on its target audience. Once the company knows about its audience, it would target them with its marketing efforts, which becomes vital. Apart from that, the company should focus on its marketing strategy more by building its business on local media channels and directories. Finally, it should utilize reviews and testimonials to its advantage since customers tend to trust comments and recommendations of previous clients.

Lesson Learned This is the list of lessons that were learned from this case

study

¡ No matter where a company starts from, it can become a big player in the market through effective strategies.

¡ The marketing strategy plays a significant role in attracting customers for business.

¡ Every business faces different kinds of challenges, but there are solutions to each one of them if proper and effective strategies are implemented.

¡ There is a major role of the leadership of the company in its success and growth.

¡ In order to grow, a company should expand to different and new markets so that it can reach out to a broader customer base.

In conclusion, Mais Moving Company was established three decades ago and since then, it has established itself as one of the most prominent names in the moving industry. The company has gained a lot of growth and has earned great market share in the domestic market.

Despite facing competition from numerous players in the market, it has stood firm and dealt with and maintained its position and competitive edge in the market. The market of United Arab Emirates has a lot of scope for growth for the company and it should avail all the potential opportunities of growing. This would probably be done by the implementation and optimization of strategies and following the trends. Just like every other company, Mais Moving Company has also faced some ups and downs during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has also considered it as an opportunity and made alterations to its operational strategy to gain benefis. The company should work on its marketing and promotional activities, as it would improve its customer base and attract more people to avail its services. Apart from that, it can introduce various discounts and promotions for the customers to attract more customers towards the business.