Hmh Publishing Giants Unite

HMH

Publishing Giants Unite

CONTENTS

Executive Summary 1

Assessment/Diagnosis 3

Analysis of the Change Strategy 5

Results/Outcomes 9

Evaluation of the Effort 11

References 12

Appendix A 13

Executive Summary

The purpose of this report is to reveal the major change that I witnessed firsthand during the merging of two major educational publishing rivals, Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt publishing companies.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a very large educational text book publisher known worldwide for the materials they develop primarily in the education levels of kindergarten through twelfth grade. The company is currently the second largest educational text book publisher in the world and has had their fair share of change projects.

In order to gain a better position in educational text book sales Houghton Mifflin publishing company decided that they would purchase Harcourt publishing company in order to better corner the market for educational materials. Since this merging of two similar companies was the largest either company had ever seen before and since both companies were equal rivals everyone knew going into acquisition that major changes would have to take place in order to have the company function as a single company and not two rivals. From my perspective being right in the middle of everything I saw three major departments have to immediately re-organize. The three departments are Sales, Distribution, and IT.

The major change project that will be discussed in this paper will be about the realignment of the distribution chain to make all of the distribution centers congruent and maximize the efficiency of the entire distribution chain as a whole. Throughout the merging process there have been many change management projects, some small and hardly noticeable, and some that have changed the some of the warehouses completely.

With the re-alignment of the distribution chain completed I can honestly say now that it could...