Please give a vision and mission statement and current situation to this case

Poult Biscuits

Poult Biscuits More CEOs are taking the view that the traditional model of hierarchal management is no longer productive. Where there is too much bureaucracy, workers are less motivated to perform their job to a high competitive standard. Carlos Verkaeren realized this in the early 2000s, when he took over the top job as CEO of Poult, a French private label food company making biscuits and cookies in France. He wanted to improve productivity, quality and responsiveness at the companys main plant in Montauban, a town close to Toulouse. For him, it was a matter of necessity. Sales at Montauban were hovering around 50 million per year but had been going down slowly from 2002 to 2005. The 135-year-old factory would not stay open much longer if it continued along this downward path. Although he made a well-timed acquisition of a large biscuit maker in Brittany in 2005, which more than doubled the size of Poults revenues, the main engine for the companys growth was still the original plant. He had to create the conditions where the Montauban employees were motivated to improve their performance. To win market share in the biscuit market, private label companies like Poult had to come up with new recipes for innovative biscuits for their clients, supermarkets such as Carrefour or specialty food brands like Michel et Augustin. It is a demanding market, since biscuit and cookie recipes can quickly go out of fashion. A state of continuous innovation is necessary to succeed in this business. He also knew he could not accomplish these changes alone, that he could not drive the transformation project from the executive suite. He decided to push the energy needed to make the change happen down to the shop floor. If this was going to happen, the employees had to lead the project. In January 2007, Verkaeren closed the biscuit factory for two days and brought all 350 factory workers together for a general meeting in a large tent. He wanted them to come up with a new structure inside the plant. He wanted them to clear away the bureaucratic rules and regulations that had effectively destroyed their moral compass, so that they could start behaving out of a natural human desire to be more creative and be able to take independent decisions to the benefit of themselves, their teams and the organization. On his side, he imposed some basic management principles such as agility but, basically, he left it up to them to run the show without interfering too much in the exchange of ideas. Wanting more autonomy, the factory workers came up with several ideas to reduce unnecessary managerial controls and to form work teams around product lines of biscuits. By organizing themselves in teams, two layers of middle management were eliminated in one stroke. This new structure also gave Verkaeren the agility he wanted in the highly competitive biscuit market. Following the collective meeting, a pilot group of employees produced a document that described their shared strategy for improvement and the new organizational structure to transmit the fundamental learnings to their colleagues. As part of the innovative approach, each team was responsible for the production of a certain line of biscuit or cookie among the two dozen or so product lines. Some lines were more critical than others, such as breakfast biscuits, which accounted for nearly 25 per cent of sales and cookies, but nevertheless workers were confident that they could manage their product lines in teams and without the need for management layers above them. As each team was responsible for an entire production line, every collaborator on the team was also responsible for performing a specific function among those in the production cycle, including R&D, operations, quality control, logistics and distribution, accounting, sales and after-sales support. Once a week, the teams would assemble in open meetings to plan out schedules and changes in staff requirements covering absences or the hiring of temporary workers for the coming period. For Poult employees, their rediscovered motivation to work in teams together was a clear example of corporate social responsibility in action. Soon after the general meeting, Verkaeren hired an executive named Mehdi Berrada to lead the initiative, freeing up the CEO to follow up on the integration of the recent acquisition in Brittany and to handle Poults relationship with its owner, a private equity firm in Belgium that had owned Poult for nearly 20 years. The firm named Artal/ Invus had been waiting for the right moment to sell Poult to make a decent return on investment. Verkaeren was encouraged by the progress being made at the Montauban facility following the implementation of the new organizational structure. He was also impressed with Berradas leadership abilities, knowing that under him the firm had a sustainable future. Indeed, sales of biscuits and cookies produced at the Montauban plant picked up dramatically, rising from 13 million in 2005 to 66 million in 2013. In 2006, Artal/Invus sold Poult to a different private equity firm in France at a price that resulted in an excellent return on its investment. As CEO and Deputy CEO, Verkaeren and Berrada were retained by the new owners since their strategic vision had been far more successful than anticipated. In a video clip circulated to employees, Florence Mazana, a machine operator at Montauban, said operators no longer considered themselves just numbers but valuable staff members whom the CEO would recognize when he came out onto the shop floor. To be recognized as individuals who could make their own decisions motivated her and her colleagues and made them feel more motivated as employees. For purely financial reasons, the new private equity firm sold Poult to yet another French private equity firm in 2014. However, Qualium Investissement, the most recent investor, decided to part ways with Verkaeren the following year and replace him with Berrada as CEO. A year later, Qualium decided to replace Berrada with a more traditional CEO from another food company that Qualium owned. Having improved Poults operating results by 25 per cent during the previous 12 months, Berrada left Poult much stronger than ever before upon his departure in 2017. Moreover, Berrada has no regrets about his job performance. He is proud of his role in helping to create and lead a humanized culture that empowered Poult workers on the shop floor during the entire ten-year experiment. However, he wonders how long the company can survive in a very uncertain and complex environment if its new management does not instill and sustain a change culture.