INFLUENCE OF STRATEGIC CHANGE INITIATIVES ON OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE OF EAST AFRICAN PORTLAND CEMENT LIMITED, KENYA

Globally many firms are currently undergoing strategic change to adapt to the new market environment in order to retain their market share and enhance their profitability. The strategic change programs arise from organized management strategies such as culture change, business process engineering, empowerment and total quality. Various studies suggest that strategic initiatives were mainly around improving quality and productivity, reducing costs, restructuring and culturebuilding, rather than finding partnerships and assistance from across the newly opened boundaries. The purpose of this study therefore was to establish the influence of strategic change initiatives on operational performance of East African Portland Cement Limited, Kenya. The study employed a descriptive design using quantitative approaches. The target population was all 500 employees of East African Portland Cement Company. The study used questionnaires to collect primary data. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences was used to analyze the data and the results obtained were presented using tables. The R2 value of 0.6851 implies that 68.5% of the variations in operational performance can be explained by the variations in independent variables. This therefore means that other factors not studied in this study contribute 31.5% of operational performance. It was established that all the independent variables positively related to operational performance and were statistically significant at the 5% significance level.