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.
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.
Recommend the redesign of Hershey's performance management system to appeal to the diverse groups that it employs.
Once a multifaceted corporation or company like Hershey's makes the decision to adopt a particular Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system within their overall operational structure, the planning and implementation phases are simply the beginning of a continuous and constant process of observation, adjustment and analysis. 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 control, because the Hershey Company is working actively exert full control over the minute but exponentially multiplying changes which inevitably occur whenever a large enterprise makes systemic adjustments to its performance management philosophy. By utilizing change control to effectively predict and respond to the thousands of minor adjustments made to an ERP system, the Hershey Company can mitigate the consequences associated with organizational reform and generational alignment.
In terms of the trends identified in this chapter, describe which one may impact Hershey the most.
During the last three decades, the emerging field of ERP has revolutionized the methods by which multifaceted organizations, including corporations like the Hershey Company and its network of manufacturing and distribution plants, by enabling management to "integrate data across and be comprehensive in supporting all the major functions of the organization" (Motiwalla & Thompson, 2009). By allowing companies to fully incorporate all aspects of their enterprise's daily operations, such as capital financing, accounting, production, marketing and public relations, implementing a sufficiently structured ERP system is a crucial component within the operational hierarchy of nearly every major business. This concept is evident in Parsons' appeal to "the younger generations' eagerness for challenge, autonomy, and results, through a bottom-up redesign effort, in which people throughout the company set goals and track progress on projects."
If you were a Hershey's employee, analyze how you would interpret the values that Hershey embraces in relation to your role.
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