Situation
Our client was trying to be more responsive to local market needs and regional developments while they at the same time orchestrated global activities to achieve synergies across geographies. To this end, the client wanted to ensure the roles of the corporate functions were clear. The company had started to move more tasks to the regions and a dialogue between headquarter functions and regions had been initiated to discuss where to best place tasks and activities. Concurrently, the client was planning to establish a new business unit to expand service offerings in the market that needed support from HQ functions.
Challenges
- Regionalization
- Moving towards a more regionalized setup would make some HQ functions and people redundant
- Agreeing resource allocation and determining required capabilities in target organization
- Operating model
- Operating model not defined to describe ways of working and key interfaces between functions
- Governance
- Roles and responsibilities between Corporate and Regions not fully clear, e.g., what authority does the head of a functional area in the region have versus corporate?
- Unclear governance and no guiding principles in place to facilitate collaboration across the value chain
Approach
An important step was to facilitate discussions between stakeholders to best describe the role and responsibilities between corporate and regional functions.
Benefits
- Current issues related to roles and responsibilities addressed
- Guiding principles in place for future organizational development
- Role and value-add from HQ functions more clear