Project Description

“Can anyone imagine that Organisation Structure can make a huge impact in transforming a company?”

This is a case of the No.1 company in the industry well diversified into various businesses. Promoter driven since the beginning. Reasonably profitable. After 25 years of promoter driven, the MD had the vision of bringing in a professional CEO to head the company. CEO was appointed and he took charge. The scale of operation was immense. 6000 on roll employees, more than 6000 on contract basis, 19 large manufacturing units, around 3000 distributors etc. Revenue under the CEO responsibility was around INR 18,000 CR. Indeed, a very big challenge.

The beginning of the new professional era….

  • The first thing which any CEO should do is, before doing anything, should be first meeting the customers, listening to the customers on the field visiting all the plants, meeting the team, listening to the team. A lot of insight one could gather during these visits.
  • The business being commodity driven could not afford a cost structure as compared to pure FMCG companies which could afford a high cost structure. The promoter had built the team with a low cost structure as one could not afford people who were from premier institutes
  • Back to the office, there were many challenges split into Organisation structure, Brand strategy & Cost Management

 

  • Organisation structure
    • It was a highly complicated structure. Multiple people reporting to multiple bosses. This resulted in lack of accountability and passing the blame. This is when the Company decided to split the entire company into 5 geographical and controlling zones. All the 5 Regional Business Heads (RBH) were given adequate authority to take decisions and move on. The company introduced Performance Management system across all functions from top to middle management, each having a set of measurable goals which could be reviewed periodically. Once this was done, the buck stopped at the level of the RBH. This brought in a sense of ownership, responsibility & accountability. Periodic review of each of the zones and functional areas once in 3 months.
    • This was a crucial game changer in the industry which baffled even competition
  • Brand strategy
    • One needs to periodically assess the performance of each brand. Many times, one becomes emotional towards a particular brand irrespective of the brand losing its relevance & one still continues to spend money without much returns which otherwise could be deployed to growing brands
    • Consequently, there were too many products and brands which had to be trimmed off which one did
    • The market segment was split clearly across the brand pyramid. Premium (Top), Value for money (VFM) (Mid), Mass (Lowest). This resulted in focus. VFM was untapped and hence one went in for increasing share in that space. This was a huge success
  • Cost Management
    • Periodic Drive across all functions and manufacturing units
  • Last but not the least, a lot of robust systems and processes were introduced across all functions to ensure smooth operations and controls. This is critical to long term sustenance