Company President Angus Black stated this week in The Edmont…
Company President Angus Black stated this week in The Edmonton Journal that the beef sausage-making company created by his grandfather “has not lived up to the high standards we set for ourselves.” He also acknowledged that rapid globalization and lack of manufacturing quality control, especially in certain processing plant locations, has weakened the company’s capacity to respond to complaints and manufacturing safety information. He noted that when European production problems with the new WEENIE-3000 series of sausage making equipment were discovered and repaired, the company did not alert its North American counterparts who also use the same equipment. “We failed to connect the dots,” he wrote. Secrecy and scapegoating have worsened Pure Prairie Sausages’ troubles. The company relies on European grocery store chains for most of its profit and nearly all its growth, yet decision-making remains centralized in Canada, where top executives have been slow to reveal quality and safety problems that have led to sausage recalls and bans in Europe. How did Pure Prairie Sausages lose its way? The core reason, according to a number of sausage industry experts, is that the sausage-maker outgrew its human expertise. “Pure Prairie Sausages cannot develop production experts and sausage industry management experts as fast as they can start up new production facilities,” said Dr. Simmental Shorthorn, a professor of food processing management at the University of Alberta and author of three books on Pure Prairie Sausages’’ sausage dynasty. “Pure Prairie Sausages’ industry expertise is being stretched too thinly and is creating more opportunity for errors in processing and management.” Before the avalanche of growth, Pure Prairie Sausages took about five years to train first-class production and sausage industry management experts in Pure Prairie Sausages’ specific processing needs, Shorthorn said. These production and sausage-making experts had time to absorb company values and practices that gave them an intuitive feel for weighing quality demands against cost concerns. These included how to negotiate with suppliers on cost without getting inferior ingredients, and how to deal with Pure Prairie Sausages’ very specialized sausage-making machinery, said Dr. Lulu Lacombe, a professor of food economics at the University of Calgary and an expert on global sausage manufacturing. “So much of what made the company work well was that each manager was trained personally by a mentor who had long experience with the company,” she said. “When the fast expansion came, Pure Prairie Sausages was very short of senior production managers and sausage-making experts who were ready to become mentors. My sense is that decisions were made more on numbers, without understanding fully the long-term impact those decisions would have on the company.” Identify two possible organizational structures from your text that Pure Prairie Sausages could use and list one important advantage and one important disadvantage for each kind of organizational structure. Use examples from the case study to prove your statements. (10 marks)