Rainbarrel Case Study

Most companies often face the need to adjust their practices and respond to the ever-changing business environment be it an economic slow-down, decreased customer purchasing power, or diminishing profits. Such entities utilize their best resources in implementing much needed managerial changes in hope to establish more efficient operations, monitor spending, eliminate losses. Similar strategy seems to provide the opportunity for Hiram Phillips to make or break a career at Rainbarrel Products. Allow us to examine several aspects of the company standing by focusing first on the problems the company faces, then on identifying their causes, third exploring alternative solutions, and lastly recommending specific solutions that if implemented could make the company successful again.

While identifying the challenges within the company, we first consider the desired outcome Hiram Phillips wants to achieve: his goal is to improve resource handling, increase sales, and establish a metrics to monitor each aspect of operations. Implementing such changes in order to achieve his goals seems to broaden the gap between performance management and human resource management, as the failure to consider most human-behavior supplements to his plan is the main cause of the problematic outcomes he ultimately faces. As a result of his rapid changes, the company now has not only dissatisfied customers but also disenchanted employees. What good would an improved matrix do, should the company lose its best from the work force and from the customer list?

Hiram’s goal to turn around the company results in less than desirable outcomes:

1) The reduction of labor cost is accomplished initially by indentifying the bottom performers and offering them fairly generous buyout packages, resulting to across the board 10% headcount reduction. The outcome of the labor cost reduction is identified by the loss of the best employees in every department. Complains across the departments now show lack of...