Gap Analysis: Riordan Manufacturing
Riordan Manufacturing, a leader in producing plastics, is confronting a number of human capital challenges. The challenges are disrupting the work environment, which ultimately affects the bottom line of the company. In order to weather this storm, the company needs to identify these issues and convert them into opportunities. The executive team also needs to understand the major players who are being affected by these changes. After understanding the issues, opportunities, and major players, the executive team will create their end state vision to help serve as a roadmap to better define their end state goals. Finally, a short and concise problem statement needs to be created to allow the executive team to focus on the opportunities that it must use to achieve their end state vision.
Issue and Opportunity Identification
Riordan Manufacturing firm is confronting issues that are affecting its ability to maintain its performance standards as a global plastics producer. The executive team is dealing with issues regarding employee motivation, transition to a new customer-relationship business sales strategy, a diverse work staff, an ineffective benefit system, and a disagreement among the executive members on the next course of action regarding the overall compensation package. These challenges will determine the company's competitiveness in the marketplace and its ability to retain and attract top talent. These challenges when managed positively also offer opportunities in creating a balanced, team focused, loyal, and committed work force and a united executive team focused on meeting the needs of their employees and its customers.
Stakeholder Perspectives
Managers, employees, and the customers are the three stakeholder groups in the Riordan scenario. Each group has their own rights, interests, and values.
Managers
In response to trends in the company, the management is making policy changes to the company strategy. The major change is the transition from an individual based sales program to a team based, customer focused strategy. As the executive team, it is their right to make this decision in a time when there are decreasing sales and uneven profits. The switch to a team based sales program will also involve the teamwork of a sales person, product engineer specialist, and a customer representative. The interest behind the decision was to increase innovation, reach new clients, and create new products by using a team environment. The executive team values integrity. Through the private consultant and their own research, the executive team understands that there are employee issues that need to be addressed in order for the company to regain its competitive advantage.
Employee motivation and rewards are effective means to retain employees. When an employee is motivated, his or her needs are being met. When an employee is unmotivated, his or her needs are not being met which results in a high employee attrition rate. Riordan Manufacturing is experiencing a high attrition rate. Riordan Manufacturing has 3 plants and employs 550 people. Recently, Riordan hired Human Capital Consulting to perform an analysis on the underlying issues that are causing the decreasing employee satisfaction and to recommend courses of action that will address the underlying issues. Research has been done to identify the issues and opportunities, the stakeholders and ethical dilemmas, and the end state vision. A gap analysis has also been performed to determine the gap between the current situation and the end state goals. Riordan Manufacturing will use this information to determine the best way to proceed towards improving its working environment for the employees.
TQL can put a single sales supervisor into place and divide teams and appoint team leaders immediately. Due to the lack of managerial experience among the account executives the Executive Sales Managers may wish to hold the sales supervisor position until a manager can be placed and properly trained. During this time, non-montary methods of rewards should be discussed for the team leaders duties. TQL should start low and move up with rewards based on performance as a team leader. Some may currently act as an unofficial team leader and may not expect significant reimbursement and TQL should take advantage of these persons.
In the past, college graduates would embark on careers in the business world with book learned business theory. Now the college curriculum can include practical use of real world situations in a web-paged virtual organization. This virtual organization allows students experience to review, analyze, troubleshoot and resolve real business problems. This paper will review the virtual company, Riordan Manufacturing, allowing students to review existing business systems, identify improvements or introduce new business systems to allow the company to thrive in the growing technology of the business world.
When Jim Kilts showed up at Gillette in 2001, the first outsider to run the Boston-based company in more than 70 years, he found a business with great brands losing market share. Its acquisitions of Duracell and Braun were not delivering. Sales and earnings were flat, the company had missed its earnings estimates for 15 straight quarters, the stock had plummeted, and Wall Street had lost patience. Yet two-thirds of the top managers were getting top ratings. People were being rewarded for effort; performance, under Mr. Kilts regime, became the new measure.
The author states that is the new solution-selling strategy, and the companies that choose to ignore this new method could be at risk at losing sales to companies who use this method (Ettenson, Conrado, & Knowles, 2013).
The Goal is a book that focuses on the theory of constraints in order to improve production. Eliyahu Goldratt brings us a pleasant story that shows the important strategies that any manager or CEO should follow to be successfully productive, and capable of reaching their goals. The book easily explains and demonstrates many attainable ways for any human being to learn how to manage their industrial relations, business processes, and also, their personal lives.
There are many stakeholders in this case and each stakeholder could be affected in various situations.
Most of their management team was made up veteran officers with college degrees, completely opposite of their general workforce. A lot of their employees had trouble keeping up with the constant changes and training. Personal issues such as death, divorce and illness effected production as well. (Beer & Swiercz, 2015) Including attracting a new diverse group of people into Weave Tech management that will be relatable to a team but also execute a customer focus work environment. The production base merit and total quality management is effective approach for the organization. It kept morale high and it will continue to drive production even in a customer based work
The aim of this report is to evaluate current Human Resource Practices within Steel Co and identify weaknesses that the current model possesses. Performance and Reward management tools available will be evaluated in order to make recommendations on how the Management tools could compliment the system that Steel Co currently employs.
This summary report will provide an overview of the decisions we made as a team, the strategies we used and an evaluation of the final results. This report will also reflect on the learnings on how to successfully manage an organization.
The main problems that are affecting the company were the high level of labour turnover, below target production rates, high levels of scrap, the employees had little input in the decision making, therefore resulting in low motivation and job satisfaction, and didn't have enough feedback on there performance. Added to this was the conflict between the supervisors and employees in the production and packing areas, and the grading and payment levels wasn't satisfactory to the employees.
We are facing a human resource crunch on our two fronts: The Engineers and designers i.e. the executive level staff as well as the Leaders who can efficiently manage the business. Improper use of good talent has led to high rate of attrition.
In addition to urgency, Gustavsson could not create a powerful guiding coalition. He established a cross-functional team to develop a new moisture-resistant product. But the team did not include a sales manager who knows customers' needs and eventually sells the product. Although the team developed a commercially-viable product, their efforts, at least in the short term, were unsatisfactory, because with sales people's own doubts about the new product, they were afraid of jeopardizing the reputation of current product. Moreover, these cross functional teams operated within the established organization maintained the company's dominate culture and past norms. We know that structurally independent teams that are tightly integrated into the existing hierarchy with different cultures and processes are often more successful.
Manufacturing businesses and business leaders need to increase their focus on key success factors such as: innovation, productivity improvement, investment in people & skills, and funding. Innovation is not just about retention and development, or the latest technology. It’s also about practical and efficient problem solving and business transformation. In the manufacturing industry, this can be achieved by: refining or exploring new supply and distribution channels, establishing new business offerings, developing leaner organizational arrangements, improving processes, providing a better customer experience, and accessing green, clean technology – high on the agenda for environmentally conscious customers (Performance, 2011)
Collaboration and teamwork is required in generating an appropriate solution(s) to fix the declining sales challenge. When evaluating a problem it is easy rely on an individual’s perspective for solutions. It can be helpful though to evaluate multiple opinions and proposal when attempting to find the appropriate solution to a problem. The following recommendation is a team oriented problem-solving process that includes multiple perspectives in order to generate the correct course of action to reverse the sales decline.