The Basics of Building a Staffing Strategy:   Ponderosa Consumer Products Case Study Ponderosa Consumer Products specializes in the design and production of household and lawn maintenance products

The Basics of Building a Staffing Strategy:   Ponderosa Consumer Products Case Study

Ponderosa Consumer Products specializes in the design and production of household and lawn maintenance products. Ponderosa’s Household Division focuses on products for use inside the home, such as brooms, brushes, kitchen utensils and tools, and various bath items. The Lawn & Garden Division focuses on products for use outside the home, such as rakes, shears, and various small gardening tools. Ponderosa’s corporate headquarters are in Columbia, South Carolina. The company has manufacturing and distribution facilities in multiple locations across the United States. 

Ponderosa recently developed the following five-year business mission: Become one of the top five suppliers across all current product and tool categories. Previously, Ponderosa focused primarily on being a supplier of safe and sturdy utensils and tools. However, to achieve the new mission, the company will be shifting to a strategy of providing households with unique and visually appealing utensils and tools that are safe, sturdy, and environmentally sustainable. 

This new emphasis on visually appealing will necessitate a new long-term business strategy for designing and producing products that have design flair, imagination, and innovation built into them. One part of this new strategy is to target various demographic groups with unique and highly appealing designs. For example, one target group includes 25 – 40 year-old professionals. Consumer and marketing research indicates this group wants utensils and tools that are not only safe and sturdy, but also have high visual and conversation-piece appeal. 

One component of the five-year business strategy, in alignment with the new enterprise mission, is to build and staff a new plant that will have freedom to design and produce utensils and tools for inside the home that will appeal to 25 – 40 year-old professionals (Household Division). Additionally, plans are being developed to convert an existing Lawn & Garden plant, located in an economically depressed area in Ohio, to focus on product development and manufacturing for this demographic. Ponderosa’s short-term goal is to have new products on store shelves and available on the company’s consumer website within 18 months, four months before the year’s holiday season. This goal will also include working through both marketing and distribution challenges.  

The new Household Products plant will focus primarily on producing a set of plastic products closely related in design, including products for the kitchen (e.g., dishwashing pans and drying racks), indoor wastebaskets, indoor plant holders and tools, and various items for use in the bath and shower. These product lines can be produced without a prohibitively large capital and facilities investment. Since the primary production material for these products is plastic, meeting the environmental component of the new mission will be a challenge for Ponderosa. The new facility’s design and engineering team has decided that each product group will be manufactured on separate production lines. However, the production lines will share common technology and require very similar production technician jobs. Based on the organization design work led by the People Division (the human resource function), the key jobs for the new plant will be the plant manager, product designers (to include professionals with various engineering and computer-assisted design capabilities), production technicians, line maintenance technicians, quality assurance technicians, and product handling roles. Much of the product handling work (including both packing and warehouse work) will be automated. The initial staffing level for the entire plant will be about 200 employees. 

The retrofit of the Ohio Lawn & Garden plant will focus on small garden tools. The strategy is to both redesign traditional tools to be more appealing to 25 – 40 year-old professionals, but also design innovative new tools that no other competitor offers and will strongly appeal to this consumer demographic. Lawn & Garden intends to have the product design work done at the retrofitted Ohio plant. This plant currently does not have a product design function, only manufacturing. Significant changes will need to be made to existing production lines to accommodate existing product redesign, and two new production lines will be designed and built to accommodate new product manufacturing. This will be an engineering challenge, because the specific manufacturing technology requirements for new products is not known. These new lines will need to be online as soon as a new product is approved for manufacture, which requires a quick and effective transfer of technology from the new product design function to the manufacturing function. Currently, the Ohio plant has 125 employees. Many of the existing employees will need to be retrained, and some may not have the requisite capabilities to make the transition to new job requirements. Many new employees, focused on product design, production and maintenance, quality assurance, and product handling will need to be hired. It is estimated the staffing level will increase from 125 employees to 175 employees. 

Due to the cost competitiveness of the consumer goods markets in which Ponderosa operates, riskiness of the new mission and business strategy, and low initial margins for new and redesigned products (due primarily to start-up costs), both plants will operate continuously six days per week (24/6 schedule). The seventh day will be reserved for cleaning and maintenance. Pay levels will be below the midpoint of the labor market, except for senior leaders, product designers, and some technology intensive maintenance roles, which will be paid above the market midpoint. Various incentive plans, including merit increases and bonuses are being investigated. A limited employee benefits package is being considered, which would include health insurance with a 30% employee copay after one year of continuous employment and an earned time-off bank of 160 hours per year (PTO – paid time off bank). Ponderosa does not offer a defined benefit plan, but it does offer a 401K plan (defined-contribution plan).

You are the corporate Senior Director, Staffing, reporting to the Chief Human Resources Officer, Greg Williamson (Executive Vice President, People Division). You are a member of a corporate cross-functional team that is tasked with the design and start-up of both the new plant and the Ohio plant. This team is led by the Executive Vice President, Operations, who reports directly to Ponderosa’s chief executive officer (CEO). The team includes key leaders from the Household Division, Lawn & Garden Division, Engineering & New Product

Development, Marketing, Finance, Quality Assurance, and other key leaders from the People

Division. In an upcoming team meeting you are on the agenda to lead discussion on the questions below. You are expected to offer your specific views and recommendations for the team’s discussion and consideration. Over the next four weeks, working with the lead team and your staffing team in the People Division, you must develop a comprehensive 18 month – 3 year workforce plan and strategy for both plants. This plan and strategy focuses both on startup, sustaining performance post-startup, and growth.  

Questions:      

1. In terms of both sourcing and attracting needed talent, specifically, what factors must be considered in selecting the geographic location for the new plant? Based on your analysis of the factors to be considered, what three areas of the United States would you recommend?

2. Concerning the retrofit of the existing Ohio plant, what factors must be considered in sourcing and attracting needed talent? What worries do you have concerning Ponderosa’s ability to attract talent to the Ohio plant? Specifically, why do these things worry you?  

3. Some members of your staffing team in the People Division have proposed initially staffing both plants with a flexible workforce by using temporary employees (18 – 24 months, short-term), then shifting over to a core workforce if the business strategy is successful. What is your view of this proposal? Members of the corporate team are likely to ask about this proposal; how will you answer them? 

4. In the early stages, leading up to start-up and perhaps 6 months following start-up, should the plant be fully staffed, understaffed, or overstaffed? Defend your answer.

5. Will employee retention likely be a problem for specific job groups? Is it possible that retention challenges may differ between plants? Defend your answers.