SWOT Matrix

INTRODUCTION: Iran has long been recognized as one of the most accident-prone areas in the world due to its special geographical location. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to devote special attention to crisis management in organizations and the identification of related strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. METHODS: The present study aimed to identify the strategic positioning of crisis management after natural disasters at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad as the center of excellence in the east of the country. To this end, the internal and external factors which militate against university crisis management were identified. Thereafter, the strategic positioning of this university was determined among four positions, namely offensive, defensive, adaptive, and contingency, using a combination of SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and Monte Carlo simulation, and strategies were presented. The statistical population were university facility experts and managers among whom 10 cases were selected by purposive sampling. FINDINGS: Based on the obtained results, the highest weights in different sub-criteria were as follows: compliance with the required technical and safety standards in new constructions of the university campus (strength), the absence of any specific plan for dealing with various types of crises in different buildings (weakness), the proximity of the fire station to the university campus (opportunity), and indecisiveness of organizations supervising building retrofitting, including provincial government and Roads and Urban Development Office (threat). CONCLUSION: The results of the present study demonstrated that strategic positioning can be identified by analyzing internal and external factors. Moreover, among the four strategic positions, it was found that the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad adopted an offensive crisis management strategy in 45.4% of the cases.

The most basic step in managing an organization is to develop appropriate and practical strategies. Developing a detailed and complete plan that will determine the long-term direction of the organization and guarantee the prof-itability and survival of the organization. In this research, using multi-criteria decision-making techniques, a new SWOT model has been created to formulate organizational strategies (financial, commercial, production and similar). The upcoming research method is of a mixed type (qualitative-quantitative) which will be used in the qualitative part of the method (de-scriptive-survey) and in the quantitative part of the fuzzy Delphi technique and multi-criteria decision making. In order to target more the results of this research and its output model, Iralco Company (Iran Aluminium) has been selected as a strategic and widely used global product manufacturer to study and implement the mentioned models and techniques.