Scenario

All Sweets Company is a mid-sized sweets manufacturing company with 200 employees. It
produces high quality sweets and chocolates, under its own brand for the local market.
Traditionally, the products were sold to wholesalers, but also directly to small retailers and
local supermarkets. Since it started producing 3 years ago also for the store brands of large
retailer chains that operate on a much larger national and even regional scale, production has
doubled.

This change in strategy was a result of a new General Manager, Johan, at the head of the
company.

“All Sweets Company” had started some 30 years earlier, when Johan’s father Frank inherited
the small traditional sweets shop where his grand-father had sold “home-made” sweets for
decades. Frank decided to focus on producing sweets for other Confectionery shops in the
town rather than sell them through his own shop. The “old fashioned sweets, based on original
recipes” were an instant success, and the company grew steadily over the years.
When 3 years ago, Frank got suddenly ill and was forced to let the management of the
company to his son Johan, it had 150 employees and produced a complete range of sweets
and chocolates. Today, Frank still owns 49,5% of the shares, the remaining shares being sold
to Johan.

Before he joined his fathers company 2 years earlier as Sales and Marketing Manager, Johan
had been working for more than 10 years for a foreign confectionary multinational in different
production and sales functions.
Being very ambitious and keen on continuing his fathers’ success story, he decided to explore
new opportunities. By combining his own product management experience with the
production expertise and quality tradition from his fathers company, Johan believed it to be
possible to enter the store brand production market successfully.

Store brands need to be manufactured and packaged according to strict and specific retailers’
requirements. Price and production flexibility are very important to qualify as a supplier for
home brands. So Johan started an important investment programme to innovate the products
offered, and to increase production output and efficiency.

In order to be able to double production capacity again over the next three years, Johan
knows that he needs to target now the capacity and efficiency of the last elements of the
production process, being the packaging, and the warehousing and shipping of the
manufactured sweets. He decides to launch two projects: the installation of a new packaging
line and a new warehouse and logistics system.
Especially the packaging worries him: Johan knows that packaging has become the bottleneck
in the production process, preventing further growth of the volumes. At each management
committee over the past months, the Production Manager Karin has been repeating that
these activities still require a lot of manual work, that they are not well enough integrated
anymore with the preceding production steps, and that the equipment and machinery used
is outdated and not at all capable for handling the production volumes

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planned by the end of the year. And each time the new Sales and Marketing Manager Myriam
warns that that capacity will be needed: She is preparing a new marketing campaign at the
occasion of the "Sweet Worlds" international trade fair, and expects this will result in an
important increase in orders for the whole range of new and traditional products and
packaging for the store brands.

The good news is that the Engineering Department has performed already a feasibility study
with their “house supplier” of sweets manufacturing machines. The proof of concept was
successful and the results will be used to design the new packaging line. The Engineering
Department will take the technical lead of the project. They will make the final machine
design, and are responsible for the integration of the hardware build by the external
manufacturer into the production line and the subsequent commissioning. Johan knows he
can rely on Patrick and his team. Patrick started 25 years ago as a production
operator/technician. As the company grew, so grew his responsibilities. Today he is the main
driver for all technical product/process innovation and the subsequent evolution of the
production infrastructure. His department supplies the majority of the highly skilled specialist
resources needed in the projects.
Johan has insisted the Lindsey, who did an excellent job as the lead engineer of the feasibility
study, will be the project manager for the implementation project. Lindsey, from
Development and Processes, is a competent and ambitious young woman. Johan believes
that she could become a key contributor to the success of the company.
Lindsey will coordinate personally the multidisciplinary team that will work on the integration
and commissioning of the packaging line. Her collegue Benny, who participated also to the
feasibility study, will coordinate the the design.

The project will take approximately 6 months. The machine manufacturer will build the new
hardware for the production line, while the Maintenance & Repair team will install the
necessary power supplies for the new packaging line. The location of the new packaging line
in the factory will be cleared by the Warehouse and Logistics project, but the floor will require
some refurbishment and modification. A contractor will pour a special concrete foundation
over the whole length of the new packaging line. The new packaging line must be installed
during the yearly 1-week production stop for maintenance. Production should in no case be
interrupted by the project.

The Production Manager Karin will accept the new packaging line only if it is fully and
satisfactorily operational. From a similar project at a previous employer, she knows that the
reliability of the machine strongly depends on the quality of the packaging materials used.
Karin expects that the safety and quality procedures will be updated and that her operators
will be trained.

Another key person Johan relies on for his investment program, is the Finance and
Administration Manager Rudy. Creating the function of Finance and Administration Manager
and hiring Rudy was one of the first decisions of Johan when he became General Manager.
Until then, the finance and administration people had reported directly to Frank, Johan’s
father.
Rudy’s excellent financial knowledge and experience (+20 years in controlling and accounting
for large companies) has kept the company financially healthy and out of the red.
Rudy controls all development budgets and verifies that all spending and investments are
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aligned to the strategic needs of the company. Rudy will personally take care of the
investment file for the bank and negotiate the loan, together with Johan.

“All Sweets Company” staff and managers

Exercises

1. Identify the stakeholders, create the impact/influence matrix and describe for each
the stakeholders when they consider the project as successful.
2. Assemble the project management team
3. Create the project brief
4. Create the Product Breakdown structure and the Product Flow diagram.
5. Identify risks and opportunities and assemble the risk register

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