Rogers Chocolate

Rogers’ Chocolates

Being appointed the president of Rogers Chocolates, Steve Parkhill is expected to double or triple the size of the company according to the board of directors. Steve holds a vision of growing Rogers Chocolate into an economically viable and sustainable company that serves multiple shareholders including employees and the community. To attain this vision Steve must establish a direction for Rogers’ which expands its brand awareness, efficient production planning, proper demand forecasting while expanding market share. This will ensure that Rogers can maintain successful growth; failure to implement an effective strategy would result in sluggish growth for Rogers and ultimately an inability to achieve Steve’s vision.

Critical Issues:

1. Production planning is complicated by the impact of out-of-stocks on the historical information used to plan the following year’s sales resulting in a distortion in the sales data.

2. Demand forecasting is difficult due to seasonality of products which cause stock-outs of other products and result in loss of sales.

3. Lacks internal capacity to produce products and fill orders in a timely fashion.

4. Rogers’ services and products do not adequately appeal to the youth which the competition is able to do, resulting in loss of clients.

5. Failing to establish brand awareness across North America hence must determine the best channels in order to reach Rogers desired target market (see Exhibit 3).

6. Resolve Human Resources issues; Conflict amongst management/shareholders whom are resistance to change. Difficult to find sufficient sales force outside of the Victoria region.

7. Ensure long-term growth for the company; to grow the company to 2 or 3 times the current size within 10 years without a conflict between shareholders so that the company image isn’t tarnished.

Situation Analysis: Rogers’ Chocolates has a number of strengths (see Exhibit 1), the brand name is one...