The Consultancy Skills Assignment

The context and the company locations

Broughton near Chester in North Wales is the home to the wing manufacturing plant for Airbus aircraft. Wings are manufactured at this site and are transported on a daily basis to Toulouse France where they are attached to the main Airbus airframe. This major Airbus UK manufacturing facility has generated a whole supply chain in and around the Chester and Wirral area of the UK. AIRparts is just one of the many suppliers of parts to Airbus at Broughton.

AIRparts manufactures and assembles sub-assemblies for the Airbus wings. AIRparts has three plants; one in Broughton itself, one in nearby Chester and one in Ellesmere Port some 15 miles away. This latter plant manufactures the parts and has a workforce of 1,500 mostly production workers with some managers and staff employees. The Broughton site assembles the parts into finished products which are then delivered to the Airbus factory. This site employs 1000 workers. Finally the Chester site houses the research and development (R&D) facility together with head office functions like marketing, sales, finance, estates and Human Resources with a workforce of 400.

The HR Function of AIRparts

The history of this organisation is that each site has its own HR function with a corporate HR department being located at the Chester site. Whilst there are currently some common HR polices set by the corporate HR team such as the pension scheme, sick pay arrangements and the job evaluation scheme which helps determine pay rates across the three sites and whilst there have been some attempts, in the past, to bring together HR activities much of the remaining HR policies, procedures and practices operate independently at each separate site.

All three sites are linked by an old HR computer system which mainly contains employee records and which facilitates the company’s payroll to be executed successfully each week and month. This system however is in desperate need of being up dated.

Senior management and line management view HR in different ways at the different sites. The management at the Elsmere Port manufacturing site generally call upon their HR colleagues when they have a problem to be sorted for example when an employee has committed a disciplinary offence or when a problem arises. The general view held by line management is that HR are good administrators and they generally react to people problems when needed. Managers don’t see HR officers out and about around the factory floor. Quite often a view is expressed that HR ‘always seem to tell managers what they can’t do’ rather than helping them to do what they want, especially when management wish to dismiss an employee.

Managers at the Chester Site view their HR colleagues with slightly more respect as this site is more concerned with research and development and HR roles tends to be more related to advising managers on learning and development for staff employees. The main issue of contention that managers have with HR at this site is HR’s insistence on the need for managers to complete their performance reviews for their staff which managers find simply interferes with their need to deliver on their R&D targets.

The assembly plant at Broughton has suffered a number of employee/management disputes over recent times particularly relating to the inconsistent application of the absence procedure. Whilst management have been very happy with the way in which HR has responded to these issues and the way they have clarified employee contractual obligations they have also been critical of HR not having developed clear procedures and policies as ‘this is HR’s job isn’t it’.

Employees across all three sites generally view HR staff as being helpful and supportive answering questions on a whole variety of HR policies and procedures and being supportive when managers seem to display ‘bullying tactics’.

Ellesmere Port Manufacturing HR Function

Senior HR Manager

HR Manager

HR Manager

HR Manager

HR Officer

HR Officer

HR Officer

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

Corporate HR Director at Chester

Broughton Assembly Plant HR Function

Senior HR Manager

HR Manager

HR Manager

HR Officer

HR Officer

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

Corporate HR Director at Chester

Chester R&D and HQ HR Function

Corporate HR Director at Chester

HR Manager

HR Officer

HR Officer

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

HR Assistant

Senior HR Manager Broughton

Senior HR Manager Ellesmere Port

Recent Developments

The Aerospace sector has been very profitable over recent times, however competition from Boeing is increasing and Airbus wish to gain as much competitive advantage as possible. This is resulting in Airbus looking to reduce its cost from suppliers so squeezing the profit margins of AIRparts and other suppliers. However in order to secure uninterrupted supplies at the right cost and quality standards Airbus is willing to invest money into supplier infrastructure such as Information Technology systems as well as to share knowledge of what it considers to be ‘best practice’ organisational architectures/structures. (Airbus’s HR organisational structure is based upon the Ulrich ‘three Box model’ of service delivery including an ‘outsourced’ HR shared service delivery partner for transactional HR issues).

Your task – As an HR Consultant (external to the company) you have been asked by the senior management at AIRparts to assist in cutting costs in the organisation by restructuring the HR function into one department, at the Chester site. Explain what you need to do as a consultant and how you would carry out your research.

(Note: you are not required to suggest a new structure as this is outside the scope of this assignment. Instead, focus on research methods and the consultancy process.)

(This is a fictitious cases study and although it uses some well-known Commercial Aerospace names the content does not necessarily reflect reality)