Southdown Company

Southdown Company

Introduction

A successful company is the one which has clear objectives and goals in front of it. Having the most perfect and achievable goals is only the first step towards success. What a company needs is a transformation of the goals and objectives into workable strategies. These strategies will be of no use if the people in the organisation are not committed to excellence. Human resource is the most important asset of any organisation. The success of an organisation highly depends on the human resource it has. If the right people are hired at the right jobs, they are trained, developed and given a generous reward, there is no doubt that the organisation will flourish. Strategic human resource management is essential in order to have a competitive advantage. This paper will throw light on the characterization models. The paper aims to solve Southdown Company's internal problems effectively by analyzing the business context and market position. It also focuses on recruitment and selection, training, reward and organisation culture as a source of competitive advantage. Recommendations for making the process of Human Resource management better are also being provided.

Discussion

Southdown Company is one of the leading dairy products manufacturers of United Kingdom. The products of the company include powdered milk, butter, margarines, orange juice, and dairy desserts including trifles, mousses and yoghurts. Southdown Company holds a strong market position. Southdown Company is very successful in a food sector that is increasingly catering for healthy and single portion products. The manufacturing process takes place across nine sites in the UK. The company employs over 3,000 workers and 60 to 70% of the employees belong to a union. Each site has a personnel manager and a personnel assistant. There is a Human Resource Director at the head office in Northampton.

Characterisation and Life Cycle Models of Human Resource

The life cycle models were developed by Baired & Meshoulam in 1988. The model is based on four stages of development of a firm. The stages are start up, growth, maturity and decline. This also applies to the Human Resource Management. The firm's strategy is already in the process regardless of lifecycle (Schular, 1989). Organisations need to develop HRM practices that lead to the development of an employee's role behavior that is supportive of the strategy it adopts. It can influence the organisation's performance effectively. The practice of HRM in organisations can be categorized into three philosophies namely accumulation, utilization and facilitation. Strategy is the direction in which the organisation intends to move and establishes the framework for action in order to achieve the firm's objectives. The purpose of a strategy is to maintain a position by capitalizing on the strengths of an organisation and minimizing its weaknesses (Thompson and Strickland, 1987 pp. 45). Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfill stakeholder expectations (Johnson, Scholes, ...