Seminar 4 Case Study The Exley Chemical Company Page 314
Problems
Macro When looking at the macro level of problems within the company there are several that stick out right away. First, I would assume The Exley Chemical Company is struggling with the decrease in sales dollars and profit margins caused by the changes made in the last year. The company started out doing well but, “in the last year or so, both sales and profits have been disappointing (Brown, 2011, p. 314). When you compare the growth dollars over the years they grew at higher rates however the increase has recently declined greatly over the last year. The majority of this decline may come from the lack of coordination between the company’s departments in the operations. Secondly, the conflicts between the different departments appear to put unnecessary stress and workloads on members of each department. When these different departments came together we found, “problems began to develop in the period following the creation of the product development division” (Brown, 2011, p. 314). The structure of this company is inadequate and is putting responsibility on departments that are not designed to handle this type of work.
Micro
The micro levels of The Exley Chemical Company appear to suffer from a huge separation between the marketing and the product development departments within the company. Splitting up sections of the marketing between departments is never a good idea. For example, “the product development division started using a small force of specialty salespeople to conduct pilot marketing programs” (Brown, 2011, p. 314). They also gave marketing research to another department, yet forecasting was left within the marketing department. The company is having issues in developing any type of team concept regarding to the internal customers (inner departments). It appears as