Sunrise’s first business, City Market, launched in the early 1990s and grew to become the leading supermarket in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). City Market developed a reputation for having the best quality and variety of items. Off of the success of City Market, the company was able to launch several retail brands and quickly grew to more than 400 employees. The company’s structure, operations, and decision-making practices didn’t change along the way. As a result, Sunrise began experiencing decreases in revenues, profits, and overall performance.
Sunrise hired Omcore Consulting to transform the company’s people operations and put it back onto the growth trajectory.
1. The Situation
Sunrise’s revenues fell by 40% from their previous high over the span of three years. A deteriorating economy and an increase in the number of competitors played a role in this drop, but ownership knew that the company’s problems ran much deeper. It was clear that Sunrise needed immediate intervention.
Our senior consulting team flew to Kinshasa, DRC, and conducted a thorough assessment of the company’s operations. The following issues were immediately prevalent:
- The company didn’t have a formal organization structure. Reporting lines were not clear and critical business decisions were often delayed as a result.
- Job roles were not clearly defined. Employees were responsible for whatever the ownership team delegated to them.
- Communication lines between ownership, managers, and employees were broken. Decisions were made without consulting or communicating with the relevant stakeholders.
- Decision-making authority was concentrated at the ownership level. Managers required authorization from the owners before making any decision, no matter how trivial. The day-to-day operations were paralyzed by a lack of proper delegation and employee empowerment.
- The company lacked a formal human resources function to manage people operations. All HR decisions and operations were handled by the owners.
- HR operations were paper-based with no formal policies, procedures, and workflows.
- Compensation and benefits were inconsistent. Allowances were created to accommodate employee requests and were provided on a case-by-case basis. Employees in the same job role received varying levels of compensation and benefits for no apparent reason.
- Accountability and performance management were non-existent. The company only focused on financial metrics such as P&L. Therefore, Sunrise was unable to identify the root causes of the challenges they were facing.
2. Our Approach
Top management needed Omcore to complete the project on a strict timeline in order not to hinder the company’s growth strategy. We focused on the following components throughout the project:
Strategic Alignment
Aligning the owners and getting their commitment on a single strategic direction was a challenge, but without it, our project wouldn’t have seen the light of day.
Financial Impact
The sharp drop in Sunrise’s revenues made financial sustainability and growth as the top priorities to the owners. Any solution we presented had to result in a positive financial impact.
Implementable Solutions
Before engaging Omcore Consulting, Sunrise launched multiple projects to improve its operations, but they were all stopped at different stages due to operational complications that were not foreseen. Sunrise tasked us with the full implementation of our deliverables.
Performance Focus
Sunrise required deep insights into their performance, especially at the employee level. Solutions were designed using a performance-first mindset with clearly defined KPIs.
Business Intelligence
The owners at Sunrise spend significant time outside the DRC. They needed a way to monitor performance, in real-time, from anywhere around the world.
Culture Transformation
Changing the internal culture at Sunrise was critical to sustaining our implemented solutions. Our team developed a change strategy with multiple milestones for creating awareness and encouraging adoption of our transformation initiative.
3. The Solution
The project kicked off with a detailed assessment of Sunrise’s operations. After aligning with ownership on a clear strategic direction, our team designed a relevant organization structure with detailed functional statements and clear reporting lines. We defined operational processes and cross-departmental workflows and associated each step to its relevant job function. HR policies and procedures were developed in compliance with the DRC labor laws and implemented across all business units.
We performed a job analysis on-location by interviewing and shadowing all employees. The job descriptions we designed highlighted the duties, responsibilities, and areas of accountability for each role. Scope and span of control information were provided in the job descriptions to further clarify each role’s contributions to the company’s operations.
Our consultants defined KPIs for every job role at Sunrise. The KPIs were presented using detailed KPI cards that included information such as definition, purpose, data source, calculation formula, targets, and thresholds. In order to enable HR analytics capabilities, Omcore collaborated with an HR software provider to build a custom platform to manage the entire people operations. The software implementation resulted in the complete digitization of the HR function. For performance management, we created an automated employee KPI system that could provide progress on performance requirements in real-time through a live dashboard. Sunrise is now able to track performance at any point in time and identify potential issues proactively.
To design the compensation and benefits scheme, we conducted a job evaluation across the company and benchmarked against available market data. As a result, we designed a compensation and benefits scheme that aligned total rewards of critical positions to the market without increasing financial spend. A clear pay strategy was implemented, along with a salary scale and grading system, and included a policy for providing raises, promotions, and performance-based bonuses.
The Omcore team implemented all deliverables and performed multiple on-location audits to ensure that the deliverables were utilized as intended.
Project Scope of Work
- Conduct primary research using on-location visits, interviews with similar retail businesses, and interviews with stakeholders
- Conduct secondary research on industry best practices
- Audit existing processes and workflows
- Develop audit report with a recommended action plan
- Design organization structure based on Sunrise strategy
- Submit organization design options to management and discuss implications of each one
- Develop final organization structure with functional statements
- Administer online job analysis questionnaire
- Conduct face-to-face interviews with employees to clarify questionnaire data
- Create job families and map to existing and new job roles
- Draft job descriptions with competencies and proficiency levels
- Validate and finalize job descriptions and competencies with management
- Review DRC labor law
- Develop HR policies and procedures in compliance with ISO 9001 standards
- Design detailed process maps with workflow details
- Validate policies, procedures, processes, and workflows with management
- Develop functional requirements documentation for ERP implementation
- Design performance appraisal system using objectives and competencies
- Define KPIs for every job role and present them in a KPI library
- Validate and finalize KPIs with management
- Review existing compensation and benefits data
- Conduct job evaluation analysis and benchmarking
- Develop job ranking model
- Prepare total rewards recommendations report
- Develop salary scale and grading structure
- Create compensation and benefits policy for starting salaries, raises, bonuses, and promotions
- Define HR software requirements for Sunrise
- Research market for HR software providers that meet Sunrise’s needs
- Attend HR software demos from the shortlisted pool of HR software providers
- Prepare an HR software assessment report which includes the cost of ownership analysis
- Define automation functions and communicate to HR software provider
- Support in software implementation and testing
- Socialize organization structure to all employees using a town hall format
- Deliver orientation on new job descriptions
- Train employees on new policies and procedures with hands-on demonstrations using ERP and HR systems
- Socialize performance management system and scoring methodology
- Conduct audit visits to DRC to assess implementation results
- Prepare audit reports with performance indicators and recommendations
The final project deliverables allowed Sunrise to:
- Speed up decision making by formalizing the organization structure and its reporting lines
- Hold employees accountable based on the duties and responsibilities in their job descriptions
- Embed a performance culture by focusing on KPIs and strategic achievements
- Improve employee engagement as a result of a clear strategic direction and a clear chain of command
- Decrease operating costs by automating administrative functions and performance calculations
- Enable performance metrics and analytics for proactive decision making
- Offer a competitive compensation and benefits plan that emphasizes pay-for-performance