Except for the global environmental analysis, all other analyses can be found on the micro level.
They exist as regulatory or legal frameworks, which can be binding for regions, nations or on an international basis.
With respect to the labour law of a country, it can highly influence location decisions, too.
A social market economy with rights for co-determination, regulations for patents, the company's investment and environment protection are main characteristics for a political stable system.
These economical factors influence demand, competition intensity, cost pressure and the will to invest.
The company needs to follow the market participant's change of value and adapt its strategies.
The increasing speed of technological changes, like in microelectronics or robotics indicate risks chances for a company.
Through rare raw materials and increasing pollution, an environmentally friendly management gets spotlighted more and more by the public interest.
Through environmental scanning, every segment is analyzed to find trend indicators.
[8] According to Fahey and Narayanan, scanning reveals ‘actual or imminent change because it explicitly focuses on areas that the organisation may have previously neglected’.
Scanning can include every material published in the media such as television, newspapers and periodicals.
Product-scanning includes scanning of products which announce re-emerging consumer behaviour.
It can be defined as 'the process of repetitive observing for defined purposes, of one or more elements or indicators of the environment according to pre-arranged schedules in space and time, and using comparable methodologies for environmental sensing and data collection'.
[8] Several other methods of forecasting are the following: guessing, rule of thumb, expert judgement, extrapolation, leading indicators, surveys, time-series models and econometric systems.
The discovered environmental trends are reviewed to estimate the probability of their occurrence.
The forecasted environmental factors are here classified with respect to their probability of occurrence and their impact on the company.
According to their classification, they demonstrate a high, medium or low priority for the company.
The higher the priority, the faster need to be reacted to avoid risks and to benefit from chances.