Chemicals Company

Creating the foundation for market-orientated growth

A catalyst manufacture and part of a major chemical group was in the midst of a series of strategic changes.

Originally created from business plucked from different business units, the business was now being given more independence, and being asked to take a more entrepreneurial, market-focused approach. This meant that the business and its management, for a long time part of a large, vertically-integrated supply chain needed rapidly to learn new skills and to align a disparate business behind a new common vision of the future. It turned to Evolve for help, because it new that what was needed was a way forward that would really be owned by its own people.

Evolve first agreed with the leadership team, a series of common, stretching business goals, and the necessary discrete outcomes that would have to be achieved if the business were to deliver their promise. Areas of focus were around sales, market & customer segmentation, supply chain and new product development and introduction. They also agreed that a key success factor, would be to bring a higher level of predictability to the business - crucial to delivering to its new customer base.

Evolve then worked with the leadership to communicate these goals to the organisation at-large, at the same time building engagement with key members of the organisation to develop both buy-in, a programme structure and area-specific goals. An Evolve team of one full-time and one part-time, then trained and developed the internal programme team, that would support line management as they defined and implemented required changes in each of the four key implementation areas.

At year end, the business had delivered on both its revenue and profit targets for the first time, with performance well up on half-year expectations, and had in place demonstrably more robust processes around sales and sales forecasting, operations planning and new product introduction.