The Rose Company Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Situation Analysis

The Rose Company was planning to implement a change in the overall organization structure of the company by rebuilding one of the company’s old plant, The Jackson Plant through new and improved administrative practices and manufacturing facilities. The company’s main purpose was to reduce the manufacturing cost and other overheads, while improving the quality of the products. It had also decided to replace the company’s centralized manufacturing operations by a decentralized one, in which all the activities of the manufacturing plants would be controlled and supervised by the general manager of that particular plant. The executives of the company had promoted me to the position of a general manager of the proposed plant, where I would be responsible for managing all the administrative and production related functions, except the sales, which would be controlled by the corporate office of the company. I had conducted a critical analysis of the failure of the Jackson Plant and found a number of reasons behind the its ineffective operating and production procedures, which would help me in designing a competent strategy for the proposed new plant that would work as a model for the company’s other plants in the future. The proposed strategy would be consisted upon such methods and procedures, that had not been tried by any of the other plants of the company before, therefore, most of the company’s existing workforce would be unaware about these measures and unable to carry them effectively. Before the establishment of this new plant, all the departments were required to report their functional vice president in the corporate office about different matters of the employees and the organization as a whole. It was also one of the reasons of the failure of the plant because these VP’s were unable to understand the effects of decisions made by the corporate office over the evaluation and performance of their employees. Therefore, in the proposed new plant, all the departments would be required to directly report me about different issues, this would help me to know about their grievances and problems and I would better motivate them towards the achievement of the company goals. Hence, integrating a change was necessary for the success of the company, however, the change would be executed in a slow manner because the company’s existing Jackson plant would be running parallel till the commissioning of the new plant. This would also provide me an opportunity to understand the existing production and administrative landscape of the company and the changes that were required to be made.

Problem Statement

The major problem faced by the company was related to the establishment of a totally new plant, with a new and refined manufacturing, organizational and administrative frameworks. It would also require the company to develop certain new practices and installation of new and advanced equipment to enhance the quality of products. Therefore, the major issue in developing a new plant was related to the training and skill development of employees, because the company’s existing employees would not be able to run the new plant without proper training and knowledge. However, it would also be very expensive for the company to hire new and skillful employees for running the operations of the new plant because the existing workforce had a long term relationship with the company and even some of them had grown up while working with the company. But the major problem was that these employees would be reluctant to adopt any change in the company and their resistance would cause huge losses to the company’s operational capabilities. On the other hand, it was decided that the old plant would be running in parallel till the development of the new plant, which would provide an opportunity for the employees of the company to revert back to the old methods due to the level of difficulty they would face in adopting and knowing about the new methods. This would nullify the company’s initiative towards the development of the new plant, therefore, the management of the company should exercise strict and high level of supervision over the convergence process.

Another issue that I would face in the implementation of the new structure, was that the functional VP’s would not require to interfere in the affairs of the plant anymore and all the departments would directly report me, but the corporate office of the company had proposed to maintain a dotted line relationship with the employees.....................

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