Large manufacturing business – central North Island
Business Audit: sales, marketing and customer service.
The Situation:
Corporate unrest, high management turn-over and declining sales and revenue, prompted the need for a business review to identify gaps or bottlenecks in the business. The management team felt too close to the action to establish an objective view of the situation and requested an independent assessment.
The Goal:
To provide clear pointers to the business strengths, its top 10 risks and most urgent areas to address and, provide feedback and recommendations that would help reverse the negative revenue situation.
The Action:
Over one and a half days, TMT and a business partner conducted a series of one to one interviews with a cross section of staff from sales, marketing, customer service, product and quality, finance and manufacturing, to establish: whether issues were company wide, how this affected different teams, perceptions and feelings of staff, what teams needed in order to meet business needs and the subsequent impact of disruption on the respective departments and business.
Findings and recommendations were presented to the management team, prompting lively discussion around areas for improvement:
– The right fit of personnel in the right roles at management level.
– Breaking down silos and engaging teams to work together, allowing innovation and creativity for performance and product improvement to come from within the business
– Giving teams accountability for their ideas and actions
– Improvement in systems and processes around manufacturing, supply-chain and distribution
– Brand refresh and positioning, supported by well planned and executed trade and channel marketing initiatives.
– Need for open, transparent communication across the organisation.
Staff were incredibly loyal and passionate about the business but had become siloed and reactive in their behaviour, simply ‘getting through each day’, behaviours that management had failed to acknowledge.
Risks and critical success factors:
Management teams propensity to believe in the findings and take appropriate action.
It was essential that the feedback was not taken as a personal attack by management, but taken objectively; to highlight and facilitated the need for change; to provide direction and support; demonstrate the improvements that would be realised.
