Sonoco Products Company Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Sonoco Products Company - Essay Example It is evident from the study that to become globally competitive in its industry and ensuring the reduction of functions’ cost by 20% or significantly $2.8 million were the primary reasons of Sonoco’s new CEO Harris DeLoach in mandating Cindy Hartley, senior vice president of human resources (HR), to go for alternative restructuring of HR. This significantly is in line with the new CEO’s goal to control companywide cost to support a new business model that is expected to compete in the global setting and would ensure the top-line growth of the said company. It is in line with this that Hartley is faced with two alternative organisational structures for HR, the centralization and hybrid. In either of them, Sonoco’s CEO is concerned with the corresponding cost to be incurred. On the other hand, in either of them, Hartley would be more concerned on meeting three essential objectives in the HR such as the following (quoted from the case): 1. To increase GM’s accountability for talent management. 2. To distribute HR talent and support more evenly across the company’s divisions and make HR systems and process consistent. 3. To optimise HR’s ability to provide customized, strategic support to the GM’s businesses. It is important to implement strategies to meet these objectives considering the fact that the packaging industry was facing major transformation due to evident tough competition. Key players were looking forward to look for their competitive advantage. For instance, heavy manufacturing moved from the United States to countries like China and India where a substantially low labor cost could be possible. Moreover, many firms from the US started to invest outside the country. In addition, packaging companies essentially were able to draw on the full potential of emerging technologies and application of innovative tools. Most importantly, companies learned to appreciate the importance of reducing the initial-packaging-concept-to-market-delivery cycle just like in the case of Hershey which originally relied on hundreds of packaging suppliers but decided to reduce them into 20 by the end of 1990s. These were substantial reasons that Sonoco should consider to formulate effective strategies in order to stay in its business. As a result, Sonoco decided to consider being more attentive to the needs of the end consumer by the late 1990s and not only to the needs of Gillette, Kraft, Nestle and Procter and Gamble. These companies were actually also looking forward to the needs of their customers and what necessarily attracted them. Between 1998 and 2008, customers significantly viewed packaging as more influential than advertising. Thus, it was for this reason that Sonoco should potentially create a move to consider not only the needs of its primary customers but the end customer as a whole just to be able to create the right response in the ongoing trend in its entire market industry. In this paper, the proponent tries to create an important link between the prevailing events in Sonoco’s industry and its eventual moves in the midst of them most specifically from the point of view of its human resources. Diagnosis Unfortunately for Sonoco, talent was not viewed as a corporate resource. Furthermore, compensations were not viewed as costs in need of control or tools that can drive behavior. These are some of the problems faced by Sonoco as impacts of its contemporary organisational structures for HR.