Johnson & Johnson Case Analysis
This is an excerpt from the paper...
This case involves an initiative at Johnson & Johnson in the early-1990s that had the objective of reengineering the accounts payable and purchasing systems for all of the corporation's subsidiary companies to harmonize all of the separate company systems into a single shared services system serving the entire corporation. While the shared services concept has a proven track record in many applications, the concept has not proved to be productive in all organizational or industrial environments (Gunn, Carberry, Frigo, & Beherns, 1993; McWilliams, 1996). Similarly, while reengineering has been successful in improving productivity in some corporations, it has proved to be disastrous in other corporations. Johnson & Johnson sought to implement their reengineered shared services accounts payable and purchasing system through a self-managing work team (SMWT) concept. As is the case with both shared services and reengineering, the SWMT concept has been highly successful in some environments and much less successful in other environments.At Johnson & Johnson, the shared services-reengineering-SMWT initiative turned out to be one gigantic fiasco. To some extent, the shared services, reengineering, and SMWT concepts were the sources of the corporation's difficulties. For the greater part, however, managerial bungling, inept planning, and a bottom-line mentality that could not see the forest for the trees were the core of the corp
. . .
ften fall short simply because top management thinks they involve reengineering when they really don't" (Moad, 1993, p. 22). This situation prevailed at Johnson & Johnson.
Self-Managed Work Teams
The self-directed, or self-managing, work team (SMWT), the latest manifestation of the team-based organizational structure, places such matters as personnel, training, and promotion in the hands of the team, causing the team, in effect, to become almost a separate company within a company. The SMWT is a high-performance work team (Gerber, 1994). The self-managed work team tends to affect three aspects of organizational structure. The affected aspects of structure are lines of managerial authority within an organization, responsibility and accountability within the organization, and the informal organization within the organizational structure. The development of an effective team-based organization depends on the addressing of issues related to each of these characteristics of an organization.
To foster strong leadership in SMWTs, organizational management must relinquish control over details, concrete problems, and day-to-day activities. Organizational management then devotes its energies to broader responsibilities, such as p
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Johnson Johnson, Self-Managed Teams, Reengineering Reengineering, Shared Services, Management Accounting, shared services, Management Decisions, Frigo Beherns, johnson johnson, References Banner, June Guerrilla, Development Journal, shared services initiative, services initiative, informal organization, organizational structure, initiative johnson johnson, initiative johnson, self-managing team, accounts payable, moad 1993, services reengineering, shared services reengineering, self-managing team smwt, frigo beherns 1993,
Approximate Word count = 1255
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Johnson & Johnson Case Analysis
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
