Organization design
The challenge
Our client is a 100 year old Indian conglomerate and one of India’s most trusted brands over the years. The group has seven major companies with interests in real estate, FMCG, industrial engineering, appliances, furniture, security, material handling equipment and agri care. The company has aggressive growth plans for the next decade and has been undertaking various business and HR initiatives in line with the 10 year focus.
With the changing business scenario, the company felt the need to re-look at the organization structures for certain business divisions. The objective was to bring in greater efficiencies and prepare the organisation for exponential growth. In this context, the group retained Cerebrus Consultants to review current organization structures and to ensure it is aligned to business imperatives.
Our approach:
We commenced the study by engaging with the top management, Business Heads and Corporate HR for the overall perspective and future outlook. We considered the strategic initiatives determined by the company for the next 3 to 5 years as our key reference point when reviewing the Organization Structure.
We met senior management team members, identified key job holders across functions & locations as well as visited Plants & Branches across the country to understand business goals, organization structure and operations. We reviewed and analyzed the current structure and way of work on an “as-is” basis. All functions were covered in the review – Sales & Marketing, Manufacturing, Quality, TQM, Service, HR, Finance etc. The review was additionally supplemented with detailed analysis of employee demographics as well as manpower numbers & costs.
As part of the assignment, we also studied practices of other comparable organizations in terms of their approach to functional structures, business and employment models, manpower costs benchmarks as well as norms in terms of operations & productivity. This enabled us to incorporate a market perspective in our recommendations.
The resolution:
Our recommendations on the organization structure were driven by three factors – client’s growth plans, current way of operations and market best practices. The proposed structure needed to support the business focus for the future and needed to be manned accordingly.
Some of the concern areas that emerged from the organization structure study included aspects like role overlaps, department fragmentation, large span of control, high manpower costs etc. We provided counsel on new structures with a view to bringing about a stronger focus on specialist roles, cutting down time to the market, driving efficiencies, reduction in duplication of work and focusing on businesses which were expected to be areas of growth. The recommendations were presented to the Business Heads and the Board for their inputs and validation, before finalization of the proposed changes.
Our work with the company over a span of two years has helped the organization work on integrating the HR plan to the long term business plan in terms of alignment of structures and processes, ensuring appropriate levels of manpower numbers and creation of succession plans.