Essay About New Product And Lack Of Team Work

The Exley Chemical Company
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Week 5 Case Study: The Exley Chemical Company
I. Problems
A. Macro
1. Decrease in sales and profits
2. Lack of team work between departments
3. Operations are scattered throughout the company with little coordination
4. Competition has developed a new technique for the production of polymer that will
greatly reduce the cost and give this company a lead in the market
5. Lack of a clear structure for communicating across departments
6. Operational conflicts within and across departments increases the amount of time to go
through the process for launching a new product
7. Lack of willingness from departments to work with one another
8. Some processes (such as visiting with customers) are inefficiently being done twice
9. Lack of clear uniform command within this organizational structure
10. Internal conflict hindering production levels
11. The overlapping responsibilities and duties of the recently employed production
development division
B. Micro
1. Lack of aid between departments. Departments tend to be self-serving when choosing to
aid or not aid other departments in bringing new products to the market
2. Large amounts of internal conflict between departments
3. Particular internal conflict between production development division and the marketing
division based on the use of specialty salespeople and the tasks of sales analysis and
forecasting
4. Resentment between personnel, especially between marketing executives and project
mangers
5. Marketing executive voiced concern over lack of understanding by project managers
with the marketing divisions goals in terms of integrating markets
6. Discrepancies in what sales executives and project managers calculations in terms of
sales estimates
7. Lack of teamwork in all departments
8. Project managers have had ineffective results in terms of coordinating activities
9. The company was having trouble generating a team concept within the division
10. Too much unhealthy competition between departments
II. Causes
1. The creation of the product development division has been a main cause of the problems
presented above. The goal of appointing product managers was to enhance the
coordination of the product through the various stages of development in order to pursue
the companys goal of improving the sales. However, product managers efforts were
considered to be self-serving to the product that that particular manager was handling. For
example, the product manager did some marketing strategies which were seen by the
marketing executives as acts that only benefited that particular product and did not benefit
the integration of their markets.
2. Healthy competition arose between the departments which turn into negative outcomes.
Each product group wanted the best for their product such as production process,
performance process and overall sales. This created a sense of motivation and competition
between the different product groups. This inadvertently leads to each group becoming
factions and not helping in the coordination