Work Arts LLCFaced with significant shifts in market competition, a $3B global materials supplier made several bold strategic choices to strengthen its position following shifts in demand for the technical differentiation of their product and to support sustainable profitability. Realizing that strategy required new capabilities, a more competitive cost structure, and meaningful changes across the global organization, so the company set out to redesign cost competitiveness into each aspect of the business.
I was hired as the organization design advisor to guide a comprehensive organization design of the global business unit. I partnered with the company's global management team and extended design teams through the process, translating the company's strategic aspiration into a clear understanding of the capabilities and organizational changes required to achieve it.
From there, the teams developed and evaluated multiple design options before making the choices necessary to align the organization with the new strategy and extend the company's market leadership. We engaged management and the leads of each functional workstream to align on those choices and worked through how everything from daily operations to long-term goals should adapt. This included aligning functions, go-to-market, and operations to the new capability requirements, integrating product management, strategic customer segmentation by market, and production assets, and strengthening the management processes and decision-making practices that coordinate the supply and demand sides of the business.
The transformation hit its total cost of manufacturing targets on time, improving by more than $100M in combined fixed and variable costs while building the capabilities the new strategy required. Earnings improved as a result, and the business unit was recognized internally as the benchmark for how to run a successful transformation. Getting there took real work to bring skeptical stakeholders along — the collaborative approach we used to engage and support leaders at every step was what made the implementation stick rather than stall.
