Rethinking the rules of reorganization
With the US consumer sector changing at an unprecedented pace, retailers and
consumer-goods manufacturers are actively reshaping their business and
strengthening their presence in new and fast-growing markets and channels. To
help fund their efforts in these new growth areas, companies are on a seemingly
constant quest to cut selling, general, and administrative costs—and many of
these cost-cutting programs involve reorganization. Indeed, according to our
analysis, approximately 60 percent of companies in the S&P 500 have
launched large-scale cost-reduction and reorganization initiatives within the
past five years.
Yet our research shows that only 26
percent of those companies have successfully prevented costs from creeping back
up. Worse, many consumer companies are failing to reallocate resources even as
their strategies change: their budgets remain skewed toward mature, low-growth
brands rather than newer, high-potential brands, or they continue to invest
heavily in traditional capabilities such as retail real estate while
underinvesting in newer capabilities such as digital marketing and data
analytics.
How can companies capture—and sustain—the
impact of their cost-cutting and restructuring efforts? We believe part of the
answer lies in jettisoning widespread but outdated beliefs about organizational
redesign. Our extensive work with leading retailers and consumer-goods
companies has shown us that, in many cases, companies would be better off doing
the opposite of what conventional wisdom tells them to do. In this article, we
outline five new rules of organizational redesign. By following these rules,
companies can simultaneously cut costs and drive growth—and do so for the long
term.
Rule one:
Shake up the core of the organization.
When embarking on cost-cutting programs,
many consumer companies adopt a hands-off posture toward what they consider
strategic functions—those they see as core to the business, such as marketing
and merchandising—and focus instead on finding back-office efficiencies.
Companies have repeatedly searched for savings in their cost centers and
support functions by implementing lean techniques as well as through more
transformative changes such as automation and outsourcing. The core functions,
on the other hand, remain full of unexplored opportunities. For example, even
companies that have shifted a considerable portion of their media budget from
print to digital media continue to retain their print-marketing infrastructure.
The entire organization—no
exceptions—should be in scope when contemplating a cost-reduction effort. In
our experience, when companies assess the savings potential in all their
departments, they identify twice as much savings in the core functions as they
do in back-office functions.
Looking at interactions across departments
can surface even greater savings potential. Many companies—particularly those
that have been in belt-tightening mode for several years—have already tapped
into the most obvious savings opportunities within departments or business
units, but they’ve yet to examine inefficiencies in cross-functional,
cross-channel, or cross-regional activities and processes. One example of a
cross-cutting activity is retail promotions, which typically involve the
marketing, sales, and merchandising departments and require coordination across
channels (stores, catalogs, and online).
A global beverage manufacturer had been
hesitant to even consider trimming its market-research budget, as the company
had always viewed market research as central to its success. But, as part of a
broad cost-cutting effort, the company decided to review market-research
spending line by line: who had commissioned each piece of research, for what
purposes, which suppliers conducted the research, and how the results were used
across the organization. The company found that its market-research spending
was more than twice the industry average and that its supplier base was highly
fragmented, consisting of more than 50 providers. Based on its findings, the
company made several changes: it redesigned and simplified cross-functional
work flows, consolidated its vendor relationships, and created rate cards for
standard research types. These changes lowered the company’s market-research
costs by 20 percent without adversely affecting revenues.
As this example suggests, a cost-cutting
program—which companies sometimes view as a necessary evil—can actually help a
company become more effective and more agile. Reducing costs, especially in core
functions, can be a catalyst for creating a leaner, faster, and ultimately
healthier organization.
Rule
two: Play favorites.
Every part of the business must be fair
game for cost cutting, but that doesn’t mean that every part of the business
should have identical cost-reduction targets. When it comes to budgets,
management would be smart to play favorites.
An equitable mandate—for instance, “All
business units must cut costs by 10 percent”—may sound sensible and wise; after
all, it’s much easier to get buy-in from across the organization when everyone
sees that the burden is shared equally. But such an approach misses the point
of a reorganization. Setting across-the-board targets is counterproductive if
the goal is to reallocate resources from low-growth to high-growth areas.
Some companies already play favorites, but
in a way that doesn’t support their strategic priorities. For example, at a
global specialty retailer, the bulk of the merchandising department’s staff and
budget was dedicated to mature brands as opposed to newer, high-growth brands.
This situation persisted even though the company’s strategic plan had called
for greater investment in the newer brands. We’ve seen the same kind of
misalignment at several other consumer organizations, from food manufacturers
to household-products companies.
A better approach is to set different
cost-reduction targets and investment levels based on a business unit’s growth
and efficiency potential. Leaders should also define the capabilities that are critical
to growth and invest in those capabilities while “leaning out” other areas to
free up funding.1For
example, a global retailer reduced head count in its copywriting team by having
copywriters work in both print and digital media instead of exclusively in one
media channel. This consolidation helped fund new positions in digital
analytics.
Rule
three: Ask for bad ideas.
An ambitious cost-reduction initiative
will have the best chances of success if people in the organization are
empowered to think creatively and to make bold—even outlandish—suggestions.
Role modeling by senior leaders goes a long way here: when leaders aren’t shy
about offering up ideas that could be controversial or unpopular, they embolden
others to do the same.
One hindrance to idea generation is a
territorial profit-and-loss (P&L) owner. Conventional wisdom prescribes
that the person with P&L responsibility also take charge of a cost-cutting
program, because that person will be the most motivated to make it successful.
The flip side is that the P&L owner has largely brought about the current
state of affairs and therefore may not have an objective view. He or she may
find it difficult—even impossible—to envision different ways to structure the
work or different roles for individuals he or she hired. The P&L owner
might concede to incremental moves but resist a fundamental rethinking of the
organization, which in some cases is what’s needed.
One proven approach for ensuring
objectivity is to form a steering committee comprising the functional leaders
and at least two C-level executives. The steering committee’s role is to make
decisions for the benefit of the entire company rather than just one business
area.
Committee members should regularly
challenge the status quo and push for a “no sacred cows” mentality—for
instance, spurring the business unit to consider options that it may have
previously viewed as off-limits (such as automation and the use of third-party
providers). What might seem a terrible idea to the P&L owner could be an
intriguing idea to committee members. Even rejected ideas shouldn’t be
permanently discarded, but instead kept on a running list to be revisited in
the future.
At a US multicategory retailer, the
steering committee asked to be informed of all cost-reduction ideas—even those
that the business unit had considered and rejected. One such idea was to do
away with the gift boxes given to shoppers during the holidays. The business
unit felt the move was too radical and would annoy customers who had come to
expect retailers to provide free boxes for their holiday-gift purchases. The
steering committee implemented it anyway, and the result was $2 million in
annual savings. The retailer’s chief competitors soon followed suit,
eliminating their own practice of giving customers free gift boxes.
Another way to ensure the objective
evaluation of ideas is to appoint a neutral “cost-category owner” who can ask
tough questions and bring a fresh perspective. At a packaged-goods company, the
head of supply chain served as the category owner for marketing co-op funds.
This executive was able to discover maverick spending that marketing executives
hadn’t been aware of.
Rule
four: Move beyond benchmarks.
Managers either love or hate benchmarks.
Those in the former camp see benchmarks as valuable metrics for understanding
the competitive landscape and for triggering important internal discussions;
they believe companies should strive to meet or exceed benchmarks. Those in the
latter camp argue that every company is unique and that it’s therefore
unhelpful and illogical to compare one company’s decisions, structure, and head
count to another’s.
Both camps are right, to some extent.
Organizational benchmarks can tell a company, for example, the average number
of employees its competitors have in each department. But that information is
meaningless without deeper insights into what those employees actually do.
Thoughtful leaders use benchmarks not as default targets, but rather as
indicators that shed light on areas in which a company’s investment differs
markedly from competitors, and then as a starting point to generate ideas for
how to operate more efficiently.
Leading companies complement benchmarks
with a thorough diagnostic, encompassing internal quantitative and qualitative
analyses (such as time-allocation surveys that highlight the activities to
which employees devote most of their workdays). Done right, a diagnostic will
surface what should change: Where are the bottlenecks in core processes? Are
employees using cutting-edge tools, or are manual processes limiting their
productivity? Are they spending too much time on low-impact tasks?
Through benchmarking, a retailer saw that
its marketing team was 45 percent larger than the marketing teams of several
competitors. Instead of reflexively cutting head count, the retailer dug deeper
and discovered that its marketing team produced more than twice the number of
catalogs as comparable retailers did. These findings led to data-driven
discussions about the retailer’s marketing investments. It decided to
discontinue its least profitable catalogs, reduce the number of in-store
events, and consolidate all marketing-analytics functions—previously dispersed
across the company—into centers of excellence. These moves helped shave 15
percent off the company’s baseline marketing spend.
Rule
five: Skip meetings and stop writing reports.
A reduction in force won’t necessarily
lead to a reduction in work. Leaders must spell out exactly which activities
should cease, which ones should change, and which should continue. Otherwise,
those critical decisions will be left up to lower-level employees, and costs
will quickly creep back up.
We’ve found that, in many companies,
certain activities take up an inordinate amount of time but yield little
benefit. One example is the often dreaded meeting. In general, meetings occur
too frequently, last too long, involve too many people, and often don’t end
with clear next steps. When a US apparel retailer administered time-allocation
surveys among members of its product-development team, it found that designers
were spending an astounding 70 percent of their week either preparing for or
attending meetings. The survey results were an eye-opener and became a powerful
case for change. The retailer reduced the number and frequency of meetings as
well as the number of meeting attendees, in part by allowing team members to
give certain approvals via email or online instead of in person.
Another way to reduce work is to examine a
company’s decision-making processes. Many companies find that they can halve
the number of people involved in making certain strategic decisions. Typically,
after an organizational redesign, about 80 percent of decision rights are
obvious; only 20 percent—we call them “pinch points”—are murky (in many cases
due to shared responsibility) and thus need senior-leadership attention. As
part of an effort to increase organizational effectiveness and agility, a
global retailer identified its “high-value, high-pain” pinch
points—cross-functional decisions that had far-reaching financial or strategic
implications but that were widely perceived as slow and painful. A clean-sheet
redesign of three pinch points led to faster, simpler decision making. In each
of the pinch points, up to 20 percent of process steps were eliminated, and the
duration of one monthly process was reduced from ten days to five days.
Like meetings, business reports can be
time wasters. At a global food-and-beverage company, the finance function was
constantly churning out financial reports. After close investigation of who was
requesting the reports and how frequently, how long they took to prepare, and
how they were being used, the company eliminated the laborious but low-impact
reports. In total, the finance staff stopped producing 25 percent of the
reports, thereby freeing up time for more-valuable activities such as deeper
financial analysis.
There may be other activities, beyond
meetings and reports, that companies can either de-emphasize or stop doing
entirely. Leaders could come up with a list of such activities by asking
questions such as, “What tasks are being done purely because the company has always
done them? What tasks are employees constantly complaining about as not being
worth the time and effort? Are there operations that we could shut down without
major repercussions?” The answers may prove surprising.
An organizational redesign won’t “stick” without
thoughtful change management.2One
aspect of change management can be compared to a marketing campaign, aimed at
making the case for change and inspiring and motivating the
organization—perhaps through frequent CEO missives and heartfelt testimonials
from leadership. Another is more like a military campaign, concerned with
adjusting budgets, establishing checks and balances, and monitoring progress.
Retailers and consumer-goods companies that pay close attention to both these
hard and soft aspects of change management—while keeping in mind the five rules
outlined above—will be well on their way toward building an organization that
can continually control costs while also, crucially, building new muscle for
growth.
By Camilo Becdach, Shannon Hennessy, and Lauren Ratner
http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/Rethinking-the-rules-of-reorganization?cid=orgfuture-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1604
No comments:
Post a Comment