The Agro Case Analysis

AGROCER is a company that specializes in the food-processing industry. The company has eight sites in France that buy crops from local farmers and then organize the processing and packaging. The company is organized in the following way:

At a local level, there is no Head of Sales; the Head Office is responsible for sales. The role of the regional divisions is mainly to receive the farmers' production and process them locally in order to avoid any raw material losses.

The directors of the eight local units only have an operational role. They must carry out directives given by the head office; the sole decision maker as far as company policy is concerned. This very structured situation is badly accepted by the local managers. Moreover, over a 5 year period, 50% of the managers have been replaced due to impulse departures on their behalf.

At the Head Office, the Director of Manufacturing and the Sales Director have raised the problem of the bottom-up flow of information within the company. Much discussion on the subject took place. The idea of computerizing all local divisions was put forward. There are two conflicting theories: Should data processing be part of the accounts department of each unit, at least to begin with, in order to ease its acceptance? Should there be a data processing post in the same way as there are manufacturing, financial and human resources posts?

The Financial Director raised the problem of the costs that computerization would represent. Local reactions are almost unanimously opposed to the idea. The division directors are very reluctant and give as a reason the low level of qualification of their staff.

The majority of the manufacturing, accounts and human resources heads stick stubbornly to their procrastinations. Computerization appears useful, but shouldn't it, they say, be carried out in stages.

The CEO is in favor of a mass introduction of data processing. He thinks that it will reduce bureaucratic red tape (too much written information circulates thus slowing down its transmission). According to him, such an operation would only be beneficial if all staff were concerned. Even the warehousemen should be concerned by this change: they could enter information regarding the arrival of raw materials, thus providing up-to-date information permanently on the quantity of products to be processed at each production unit. The CEO is in favor of data processing training for its entire staff rather than just for the accounts department. He considers that to do the latter would curb the potential of this new technology.

The decision will be taken at Head Office level where a global view of the situation can be seen. It will then be imposed in all the factories and managers and all categories of staff will trained on the new ways of processing information if they wish. To begin with, although the option of creating a data processing post seems to be the best idea, no plans