Case Study
Introduction
After John Gemersall satisfied review of the company’s performance, Rod Burn knew that it had taken hard work to get the Kambuku process to this point and it would take even harder work to maintain and improve it.
Events leading to this point….
The situation was what Blackbeard described as a “burning platform”. The company had destroyed some serious shareholder value.
After a series of board meetings and consultation with Deloitte and touché it was decided that value based management would be the heart beat of everything they did. John Blackbeard then set a target that within the next two years they would reach a cash flow return on investment (CFROI) of 8% (from current 4%). PPC management knew that it would serve no purpose to ask the organisation to improve the CFROI. Rather, it would have to translate the numbers into behaviours. Having agreed on the CFROI target, PPC embarked on a reverse engineering exercise to analyse exactly what would have to change in the way the company operated to achieve it.
A swot analysis was done in order to determine the factors that Rob Burn had to watch for and those he could build on to ensure that the process didn’t loose momentum.
In February 2000, the Kambuku team of Pretoria Portland Cement got together in the Kambuku 'war room' to plan the way forward for the project. Most of them were engineers by profession and some of them were factory managers.
Knowing very well that the VBM program sounded very seductive and seemed like a miracle cure it required a fundamental change in the organisational culture.
The marketing and communications agency was assigned to conduct a survey amongst PPC employees to see how they saw management’s practices. In its presentations it was clear that the staff were willing to buy into the process if they understood how they could make a difference in the business.
Further discovery by the MCA revealed that there were 4 types of people in the organisation. ➢
After John Gemersall satisfied review of the company’s performance, Rod Burn knew that it had taken hard work to get the Kambuku process to this point and it would take even harder work to maintain and improve it.
Events leading to this point….
The situation was what Blackbeard described as a “burning platform”. The company had destroyed some serious shareholder value.
After a series of board meetings and consultation with Deloitte and touché it was decided that value based management would be the heart beat of everything they did. John Blackbeard then set a target that within the next two years they would reach a cash flow return on investment (CFROI) of 8% (from current 4%). PPC management knew that it would serve no purpose to ask the organisation to improve the CFROI. Rather, it would have to translate the numbers into behaviours. Having agreed on the CFROI target, PPC embarked on a reverse engineering exercise to analyse exactly what would have to change in the way the company operated to achieve it.
A swot analysis was done in order to determine the factors that Rob Burn had to watch for and those he could build on to ensure that the process didn’t loose momentum.
In February 2000, the Kambuku team of Pretoria Portland Cement got together in the Kambuku 'war room' to plan the way forward for the project. Most of them were engineers by profession and some of them were factory managers.
Knowing very well that the VBM program sounded very seductive and seemed like a miracle cure it required a fundamental change in the organisational culture.
The marketing and communications agency was assigned to conduct a survey amongst PPC employees to see how they saw management’s practices. In its presentations it was clear that the staff were willing to buy into the process if they understood how they could make a difference in the business.
Further discovery by the MCA revealed that there were 4 types of people in the organisation. ➢