Sunflower Incorporated Case Study

Sunflower Incorporated

Hayat Haqawi

Southern Oregon University

Advanced Organization Behavior MBA 575

May 7, 2017

Sunflower Incorporated is a large distribution company. It purchases salty snack foods and liquor and distributes them to independent retail stores throughout the United States and Canada which is divided into 22 regions, each with its own central warehouse, sales people, finance department, and purchasing department. Sunflower Incorporated is experiencing some competition and quality problems. An estimation of the company’s branches showed that some companies are making huge revenues by offering poor quality products while others are under pressure to keep up with competition. Loretta Williams, who was hired to solve this situation, proposed implementation of standardized pricing and purchasing decisions across all regions. She recognized that Sunflower Incorporated’s problems arose from shortage of standards for conducting the organization’s pricing and purchasing decisions.

Even though Loretta Williams’s proposal was good, it was unable to accomplish the desired outcome. This is because the proposal included major changes to the organization purchasing and pricing processes and Loretta Williams did not use the right strategies for managing the change process. Loretta Williams was successful in analyzing the problems, and to apply her plan she sent emails to the regional executive providing direction on the implementation of the new policy that relate to pricing and decision. The policy expected the executive to share with the headquarters whenever they were making major purchasing and pricing decisions. Eight weeks down the line, Loretta Williams had not received any communication from the regional executive indicating that the implementation of the new purchasing and pricing policy had miscarried.

One reason for the miscarriage was because Loretta Williams did not distinguish an obvious approach for implementing the proposed changes. Another reason for implementation failure was due to Loretta Williams’s failure to engage and work together with the executives in implementing the changes. Loretta Williams should change her strategies for implementing the change process. One thing that she needs to do differently is to prepare the organization for the change process. Also, she needs to ensure active involvement of the regions in developing solutions to the problem. Each region has its own unique business environment and therefore experiences different challenges when it comes to pricing and purchasing decision. This will ensure that the challenges and concerns of each region are addressed.

To sum up, Sunflower Incorporated company is a large distribution company, and it is facing problems in purchasing, pricing and competition. The company hired Loretta Williams to solve these issues. She established a great plan to change the company’s statues but she faced failure because she did not apply those changes in appropriate way. To solve these issues Loretta should: identify an obvious approach for implementing the proposed changes. Moreover, she should prepare the organization for the change process by involving the stakeholders and executives in the process, this making the relevant stakeholders see the need for the changes by making them aware of the problem and its impact on the organization. She should invite all the regions to contribute towards the development of standards for guiding purchasing and pricing decisions. She should centralize the pricing and purchasing in all regions find an effective way to communicate between departments and employees to ensure their understanding of the company’s’ goals and decisions, recruits and appoints the managers of the divisions, and finally, use an appropriate Management Information System (MIS) to feed performance results.