Global Multi-Products Chile

“They want to sell integrated solutions but are not integrated themselves”
The company’s vision was to be the most innovative enterprise and the preferred supplier and the preferred supplier by developing technologies and products that created a new basis of competition and by helping customers grow their businesses.

STEEPLE factors have a massive impact on how things turnout for a company in a particular country. Multi-Products Inc. encountered many problems in Chile as well. Socially, Chilean culture tends to be more reserved. People here are self-centered and don’t look beyond their immediate circle of friends and family. Difference in educational backgrounds and differences regarding recent political history have polarized society. Technology plays a pivotal role as well in bringing in clients and aligning work in an integrated system. When one looks at how Chile has moved from a command economy to a market economy you can actually look at the massive change that has taken place. Numerous companies have been privatized after decades of being in the public sector. U.S retailors that have moved in from North America have also caused a change in nature of Chilean retailors. Environmentally, small central area dominates in terms of population, north Chile has mineral wealth and the southern region is rich in forests and grazing lands. Politically, Chile moved to having a very stable government compared to the anarchy in the pre-90’s era. Chilean law required Multi-Products Inc. to set up a manufacturing unit within the country if they wanted to sell products as well. Ethical challenges would involve creating a fair and stable structure in terms of compensation, as Chileans were not happy with the varied extreme compensation methods. Multi-Products Inc. was also facing a host of problems of its own. One of the managers had rightly pointed out to Bob Thompson, Managing Director of Multi-Products Chile, that there was a lack of trust among the managers. This trust was causing inefficiency, which in turn leads to slower growth, which was harmful for the company. The company also had a flawed compensation system where the compensations were so varied that they did not offer any sort of stability. Chilean workers wanted the stability that this compensation system lacked. While dealing with their own problems, Multi-Product Inc. had to also deal with ever increasing demands of customers. Customers needed to be satisfied more with each passing day. Another problem that they faced was the lack of knowledge to implement the new system.
The firm is now making a conscious effort to move from products based teams to clients based teams. Instead of clients having to deal with 4-5 different agents, they are looking to have just one agent for all the products for every client. These agents need to specialize in how to use each product and even implement these products in their systems. The sales agents should have the ability to educate the customer entirely about the product. The company has ticked most of the right boxes in terms of their direction but will need to work towards building on team integration and trust among their own employees.
Although Multi-Products Chile is recognized for its innovative capacity and incorporation of technology, based on a newspaper survey, the company faces some challenges that involved the supply chain. For instance, the company has 270 employees in total, this include 80 people in sales, 9 in technical support, 45 in manufacturing and the rest in management, administrative and maintenance positions. Having this amount of managers could result in less efficiency. For this reason it should integrate the offices of the three countries, where it operates, to reduce the number of managers. In other words, managers should take care of regions leading to more efficient result. Consequently, the organization structure will turn from vertical to horizontal.
Other problem that the company is facing is that they should build teams formally, creating culture around teamwork, but this is going to be difficult because Chilean people doesn´t trust each other, given their backgrounds in education and political history. Also, Multi-Products Chile should change its compensation method; they should reward teams that focused geographical areas instead of rewarding individuals, and they should set targets based on the team’s area and ability, giving commissions accordingly. Given that one of the company´s comparative advantage is innovation, they should use online software and integrate the system between their clients and company. This software will help in understanding the demand of the products as well. Also, in order to increase efficiency, they should update this system on a weekly basis.