Procter & Gamble Case Study

Procter & Gamble Case Study

Question 1

What is Procter & Gamble’s business strategy? What is the relationship of collaboration & innovation to that business strategy?

The Procter & Gamble business strategy is to maintain the popularity of its existing brands, via advertising and marketing.  It ensures the extension of its brands to related products by developing new products under those brands and to use unique innovation to create new brands entirely from scratch. Since so much of P&G’s business is built around brand creation, it ensures that collaboration is facilitated between managers, marketers, and researchers. P & G is a big company, and they’re achieving this goal is a daunting task. Therefore, P & G critically use innovation to ensure that there is a groundbreaking innovation of new products in such an extremely competitive field like consumer products. P & G innovation is usually from the 8, 000 scientists the company have in 30 sites around the world. P & G is able to produce unique new products because of its ability to facilitate collaboration and innovation.

Question 2

How is P & G using collaboration systems to execute its business model and business

strategy? List and describe the collaboration systems and technologies it is using and

the benefits of each.

P & G is using collaboration to execute its business model and business strategy by implementing information systems that bring about effective strategies between its operations. One of the collaboration systems and technology used by P & G is email .email may not be a sufficient collaborative tool to ensure that the information intended to be shared with all the targeted recipients for it might cause a situation where the most targeted recipients will not see the mail and the less targeted recipients will see the mail. However, at P & G, email is the most used tool for communication. Other collaborative systems and technologies are blogs. Even though blogs are intended to deliver the intended information to a large pool of people, the employees at P & G resisted the use of this kind of collaborative tool, arguing that these kinds of collaborative tools add more work on top of the email.

Question 3

Why were some collaborative technologies slow to catch on at P & G?

            According to Schueller, Innovation Manager for P & G’s Global Business Services division, P & G employees have resisted the use of the new collaborative systems and technologies with an argument that the new collaborative systems and technologies such as blogs add more work on top of emails. Therefore, most of the employees at P & G uses email to communicate and not the newer collaborative systems and technologies. Generally, the P& G employees are accustomed to the email, and that’s the ultimate reason causing the employing not to be comfortable in switching to a new way of doing their operations. Twenty thousand of the employees at P & G, use Microsoft Outlook, which provides tools like calendaring, email, contact management, web browsing, note-taking, and task management. The outlook is designed to work with the Microsoft Office Sharepoint server to enable all the employees to communicate with each other.

Question 4

Compare P & G’s old and new processes for writing up and distributing the results of a research

experiment.

According to Schueller, some of the sharing knowledge processes were notoriously inefficient. For example, The written up experiments by researchers were written using Microsoft Office applications, then they were printed out and then glued one page after another to form a notebook. Therefore, P & G implemented newer and more effective methods to suffice the old methods. The new methods implemented by P & G comprised of Microsoft products, which ensured unified communication ( through the integration of instant messaging, electronic conferencing, voice transmission, and data transmission). Also, Microsoft Live, Content management with SharePoint, and Web conferencing with Live meeting. With these new processes, the researchers are able to share the collected data on various brands, the marketers are able to access the data they require to create more highly targeted ad campaigns; and managers are able to easily and quickly access the data and people they need to make critical business decisions.

Question 5

Why is Telepresence such a useful collaborative tool for a company like P & G?

For a large company like P & G, Cisco TelePresence conference rooms are very important because the Telepresence enables it to foster employees’ collaboration across countries in different continents. Despite that the telepresence technologies were very expensive and very prone to function, P & G still found the need to take search a step to ensure that Telepresence was always part of its operations. This technology enables P& G to hold high-definition meetings over a very long distance. The largest rollout of Telepresence is boasted by P & G. Telepresence enables quicker decision making, more efficient flow of ideas, and significant travel savings.

Question 6

Can you think of other ways P & G could use collaboration to foster innovation?

P & G can use ways like internal mobile telecommunication as a method of collaboration to foster innovation. This is a great way because there is a one-on-one communication between the employees.