Page 54 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Unit 3: Models of Change

Notes
of sales, while pursuing the change for growth. This meant that the sales forces’ morale
needed to be lifted up.
There were various impediments. First and foremost is mindset itself. The functional
silos, lack of team work and the merger also produced a bit of inward orientation and,
therefore, the need was: refocus attention on the consumers which is basically the external
focus. The way forward was to establish what is called Regional Operation Centre (ROC)
which comprises functions and brand sales management team which the branch manager
is co-ordinating. The second important thing was a fitment of sales and production
requirements. Some of the Managers had team targets as well. For example, a factory
manager or a production manager or a factory engineer or even the Personnel Manager of
a factory today has volume as one of his key targets. Empowerment of the ROC teams was
affected through decentralization of production and material resource planning,
management of region-specific brands which are basically ROC brands rather than having
them operationalised and looked at by Brand Managers in the Corporate Office.
Quarterly ROC Review

Regional Operation Centre’s performance Review was brought in, a mechanism again to
foster team working, accountability and launched a “Customer-first Initiative Trophy”
where ROCs are being measured on clear deliverables. And, to facilitate all this, a series of
workshops for the ROC teams was initiated. This is essentially for ROC members and
their central workshops have already produced the following three results. The first:
Common understanding of the current status of ROCs and future direction; second: team
working—what are the blocks and triggers and what is the ownership which is required
for improvement; third: greater commitment to consider consumer focus; and above all,
it really created an ambience for collective action.
What are the results? Because, at the end of all this we should begin to evaluate and these
are again self-explanatory. Service levels have gone up by 10%. There is a minimization of
sales losses. Business partners, which are basically our stockiest, are now more confident
about the way in which the business is able to service them. Team working is enabled and
there is overall improvement in sales performance as regards the beverages division is
concerned and this is perhaps a very interesting story to look at.

The next one is Innovation and Continuous Learning. One of the things that were found
was, like many things, innovation also requires disciplined approach. To facilitate this, a
distilled approach was started as well to help people manage group dynamics because
that is one key essential ingredient for innovation successes.
Towards Innovativeness
What has been the impact of these efforts? First of all this indeed brought about a culture
of innovativeness, not radical innovation as yet, but certainly a culture of innovativeness
and Kaizen experiments in factories. Quite a few people are now owning up. And there are
a number of projects in the pipeline. In the past it used to be one or two projects; at this
point of time there are 15 and odd projects. It also brought in for businesses, increased
focus on consumer understanding, automatically leading to a higher set of innovative
ideas. So these are some of the benefits that are being seen. The third one is the setting up
of a Learning Centre. In the context of non-stop changes how do we prepare out employees
to fight against obsolescence? It was looked at how Learning centres were operating
outside this country. In many Unilever groups of companies, it was discovered that a
Learning Centre is much more than a library. The essential objective is to focus on personal
and professional development as a supplement to formal training and development efforts.
Contd...

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