When Kevin McMullen looked at his company back in 2008, he saw a company that needed more consistency in the way it did business.
What a customer experienced in an Asian office of OMNOVA Solutions Inc. might vary from what a customer got in one of OMNOVA’s European or North American offices. McMullen, chairman and CEO of the technology company, also saw best practices that were trapped in silos within the organization and information needed for critical decisions that wasn’t making its way to the right people.
As a result, he and his leadership team set out to create a more unified company that would use the same integrated approaches across the globe. They dubbed it “One OMNOVA.”
The first steps were laying the foundation for change. SAP enterprise software was installed to facilitate the transfer of information across the organization and a Six Sigma approach was adopted that allowed the company to simplify, standardize and streamline common processes.
“Initially, when we rolled out the One OMNOVA concept, it was a way to leverage resources in a very practical way across functional areas,” McMullen says. “But it quickly took on a deeper and more significant meaning. I think our employees have embraced it as the ideal for working together across departments, across job functions, across business units, across what has become a more spread out global operation.”
McMullen wanted to remove any obstacles that hampered the $696 million polymer company from reaching its potential.
“In order for us to achieve our full potential, we have no room to really have boundaries get in the way,” he says. “So, it is helping support, I think, our growth strategies, as well.”
The concept would create familiar corporate values and get everyone working together across the world.
“You could be in Fairlawn, Ohio, or London, England, or Shanghai, China, or Bangkok, Thailand, and those core values are the same in every location in our company around the world,” he says. “So, this One OMNOVA concept of having unifying core values is very important there, as well, so that [when] you as a customer come to see us in Shanghai, you feel like you are treated and served the same way there as you would be in one of our facilities in Pennsylvania.”