Hershey's Management Case Study Every enterprise which employs a diverse and multifaceted workforce to facilitate organization, production, and service, from major international corporations to local community churches, utilizes a concept known as performance management to maximize its efficiency and effectiveness. The field of performance management has been defined by managerial researchers as a "strategic and integrated approach to increasing the effectiveness of companies by improving the performance of the people who work in them and by developing the capabilities of teams and individual contributors" (Armstrong and Baron, 1998), and the technique has been used since the 1970's by businesses seeking to improve their organizational results. In the case of the Hershey Company, which has been built into the largest producer of quality chocolate in North America, a clearly defined mission statement defines crucial relationships with key stakeholders, including consumers, investors, suppliers, and employees. Manager Mary Parsons has applied the concept of organizational alignment to guide the Hershey Company's mutually beneficial interaction with its thousands of employees worldwide, with "aligned" employees working collaboratively to achieve the company's collective mission by adhering closely to four shared values. The priority for Parsons and her peers on the managerial board of the Hershey Company is to achieve genuine alignment between those longtime employees who possess valuable experience and knowledge, and incoming employees who add vibrancy and innovation while still lacking the foundational skills of their predecessors.

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The field of ERP has been developed to direct the ever evolving series of changes and alterations made by an adaptable modern company in concert with the systemic requirements of its project management system. Although it has been conclusively proven that "an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation can result in a synergistic fusion of marketing, purchase, R&D, production, quality control, distribution and other cross functional activities," throughout a company's hierarchy, "the implementation requires inspecting every link in the operational and decision-making chains and then modifying them to take advantage of the new systems" (Bakht, 2006).
Describe the effects that mentoring could have on integrating values into the Hershey culture.

Mary Parsons and her fellow executives at the Hershey Company must heed this dictum in a number of ways during the redesign of their human resource management policy, but the choice to pair incoming employees from the "millennial" generation now in their twenties with more experienced senior staff is an especially inspired managerial decision. This practice of "unwrapping human potential" through a targeted mentoring program represents an example of change…