Human Resource Management homework help
Human Resource Management homework help. Case Study 5.2
TK Ceramics: an Indonesian Opportunity
Tim Bortolli, Kate Johnson and Renee Nguyen were approaching exhaustion at their second
straight 12-hour day of meetings. Tim and Kate were joint owners of TK Ceramics, a small
business they started together after leaving university. TK Ceramics had grown to become
Victoria’s largest importer of European ceramic tiles, now operating from a 4500-sqm
warehouse in Port Melbourne, with 70 staff. Renee holds the newly created title of General
Manager of HR; the title reflecting the impending growth of the company.
The long days of meetings were due to the immense amount of planning required to put in
place the next phase of the company’s growth. TK Ceramics had enjoyed a lot of success in
importing tiles from Italy; the European styles, designs and colours translating well to the
culturally diverse Melbourne market. Rather than sell to the public, TK Ceramics sold
wholesale to bathroom stores all over Victoria, and collaborated with a few exclusive
architects who worked with high-end renovations. Twenty-two field sales representatives
continuously worked their large retail customer base, and a further 28 staff worked in the
warehouse – unpacking, checking and shelving incoming stock, as well as preparing
shipments for the company’s delivery fleet four times a day. Another 20 staff worked in the
office, in roles such as customer service, finance, accounts and administration.
However, a year ago, Kate had been on a sabbatical in Jakarta Raya, Indonesia, taking a
motorcycle tour with her partner. While taking a ‘back-roads’ tour one day, she had come
across a small tile factory that produced plain ‘standard’ tiles, and, not being able to fully
disengage from work, asked to meet the owner.
Kate spoke with the owner, Alatas, all afternoon, toured his facilities and made a promise to
be in touch as soon as she returned home. She was very excited about the opportunity to
develop a new supplier. While sales of European tiles were still strong, they were expensive,
and they had to carry a lot of stock to cater to the wide variety of tastes in Melbourne.
Alatas’ factory represented a chance to supply tiles to the mass market – new home building
companies, commercial installers, hospitals, shopping centres and so on, where design was
less important than price and functionality.
Tim and Kate decided to go for it, and met with their bank and business advisers to plan the
expansion, and hired Renee to develop and execute the HRM strategies. They decided to
launch the new business stream through a new, wholly owned retail network, a radical
departure from their existing business model. In addition, they were going to create a new
brand for their shops. They had decided to maintain their current business and its
relationships under the identity of TK Ceramics. They had, however, adopted the strategy of
‘multiple presences’ and were determined that their new business stream wouldn’t dilute
their existing one.
Renee was now immersed in the HRP to execute this strategy. She needed to design a
structure which clearly separated both supplier and customer-facing staff into the separate
streams, but could also make use of the existing warehouse infrastructure for both.
Further, she had a mission-critical task to complete before anything else.
All ceramic tiles sold in Australia must meet strict Australian Standards – ISO 13006: 1998
10545 Test Methods.
Preliminary investigations of the product produced by Alatas’ factory showed that while the
tiles were generally good, there was too much variation in size, surface finish and strength to
consistently meet the standards. Testing each batch in Australia and rejecting non-compliant
tiles was too expensive and wasteful. The quality control had to take place in Jakarta Raya.
Alatas was very happy to do this, as the new deal with Tim and Kate would result in a neardoubling of his output.
However, Tim, Kate and Renee had concerns that the expert human capital required to
design, implement and monitor the quality procedures in Alatas’ factory weren’t available in
Indonesia. They had just decided to recruit and send an Australian expert to Indonesia to
embed into the factory for a year, to ensure that there were no problems with standards
compliance and wastage at the Australian end.
Tim hadn’t needed to do this before. Most of the Italian tiles they imported were already
tested and compliant with the strict EU standards, and Tim’s Italian heritage and language
skills made communicating their needs to suppliers in Italy with phone calls and an
occasional visit very effective.
Renee’s list of jobs was growing rapidly. Not only did she have to prepare to staff the seven
launch stores, she had to redesign the workflow of existing staff to support the ‘multiple
presence’ strategy. She also needed to find just the right person to send to Jakarta Raya.
Source: Prepared by Stephen Turner, Murdoch University, Perth.
Questions
1) What is the best process to redesign the internally facing and customer-facing jobs?
2) What are the advantages and disadvantages for drawing at least some of the shop
workers from existing staff?
3) How would you create job descriptions and person descriptions for jobs in the shops that
do not yet exist?
4) Do the field sales representatives have similar key skills and abilities requirements to
those that may be needed for the shop staff? Discuss