Cultural differences and a lack of management talent worldwide can make it difficult for global enterprises to attain their business objectives. With three joint ventures in China, a major food company asked Hewitt Associates to help maximize the effectiveness of local talent-critical to long-term success-by aligning people development and process improvement with the company's goals.

We listen.

One of the largest food companies in the United States has three operational joint ventures in China, located in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. As the company focused on expanding market share in China, it sought Hewitt's help in developing local management talent. Then, as business goals shifted to achieving greater profitability, the company also asked Hewitt to help it maximize productivity and efficiency in the Beijing joint venture.

We learn.

Many of the local Chinese employees lacked management skills and needed training to provide management continuity globally. Facing a shortage of management talent throughout China, the company wanted to make development of existing talent a priority so it could ultimately replace four expatriate managers with effective local leaders.

We work together to develop innovative solutions.

Hewitt met with management to help identify several business processes that needed improvement. These included processes for providing quality customer service, purchasing, performance management, and coordinating between sales forecasting and production planning. Hewitt helped management organize teams of people who were directly related to those processes and assigned each team to a process improvement project. Because the local employees lacked many of the skills required by the U.S.-based parent company to improve these processes and to improve business results, Hewitt provided training in areas such as customer service, communication, problem solving, action planning, and performance management. Building on this foundation, one of the joint ventures added the goal of profitability. To reach this goal, Hewitt worked with this top leadership team to develop a one-year organizational change process. This included linking the process to the company's business goals and strategy, and developing measurements that focused organizational energy on key areas of performance including financial results, people development, learning/innovation, and customer loyalty. The effort also included creating a competency model that identifies critical skills, behaviors, and abilities and identifies gaps between managers' current competencies and the competencies needed for success.

We measure results.

The project teams successfully improved operational processes, as well as cross-functional communication and teamwork, with encouraging results. Customer satisfaction increased, with 60% of customers indicating they preferred the company over its competitors. The rate of management turnover dropped from 12% to 7%. Overall costs were reduced, reflected by a 10% increase in gross margin in just one year. In addition, sales tripled for the joint venture in the first year following Hewitt's first intervention-management development and process improvement. Today, top leadership has a common understanding of the company's business goals and strategy and works toward established departmental and organization-wide performance targets. Competency assessments for each employee have been completed. Future work will include refining the Beijing operation's performance management system and designing training to specifically address identified competency gaps.