Case Study

Treetop Forest Products Inc. is a sawmill operation in Oregon owned by a major forest products company, but it operates independently of headquarters. Treetop receives raw logs from the area for cutting and planning into building-grade lumber. Treetop has one general manager; 16 supervisors and support staff, and 180 unionized employees. The mill is divided into six operating departments: boom, sawmill, planer, packaging, shipping, and maintenance. The sawmill, boom, and packaging departments operate a morning shift starting at 6 a.m. and an afternoon shift starting at 2 p.m. Employees in these departments rotate shifts every two weeks. The planer and shipping departments operate only morning shifts. Maintenance employees work the night shift.

At first, Treetop Forest product even won some Westboard’s packaging quality award and enjoying a very high ratings of packaging quality. But the situation start to change after a few years later, several clients complained about the appearance of the product and some of them switched to competitors’ lumber because of the substandard appearance of Treetop’s packaging. The company can use the term of collaboration to develop a solution to the problem above. Collaboration relations refer to involve the process of sharing resources including ideas, know-how, technologies, and staff between two or more different organizations for creating a better solution to a given problem (Plunkett, Attner and Allen, 2002). According to this theory, both of the parties which include Treetop Forest product and their customers should openly discuss about the issue of packaging quality and share the valuable opinions to one another without any selfishness in order to seek for best solution for the problem. In my opinion, the company can discuss the best appearance with the clients so that the company can create the standard appearance of packaging that accord with the client require. It is very important to gather the feedbacks from the...