Lorraine Alvarez
EHR3340
Professor Curtis Curry
May 10, 2015

Domtar was a producer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and was consider third in the industry. It was having extreme financial difficulty when it hired Raymond Royer as president and CEO in 1996. Royer had had success at another company, but had no knowledge of the paper and pulp industry, but he did know that it needed to have a strategic vision and specific goals. He then focused on two goals, return on investment and customer service and told his team that there were “three pillars to the company: customers, shareholders and ourselves (P. Nick Blanchard, 2013).”

Domtar’s mission was reflected by three statements: “meet the ever-changing needs of our customers,” provide shareholders with attractive returns,” and “create an environment in which shared human values and personal commitment prevail.” (P. Nick Blanchard, 2013) By becoming a preferred supplier, Domtar would align itself to its mission of meeting the ever-changing needs of our customer. In order to achieve this, they would need to provide high quality products, be innovative and provide superb customer service while keeping costs down. As a first step, Royer introduced Kaizen which is a process to develop more effective processes to do work and get employees involved in the processes. After training their employees using Kaizen, Domtar was able to establish continuous quality improvement for the company; therein providing better customer service. The strategic goal of return on investment fully aligned with the mission statement to “provide shareholders with attractive returns (P. Nick Blanchard, 2013).” Beneficial management practices and policies helped Domtar improve its competitiveness in the industry and returning investment to its competitors. In the third part to the mission statement, Domtar aligned this vision with improving employee performance by putting a performance management system into place to give the employees a way to provide input to the company. Royer believed that employees were part of the key to the company’s success and that they needed to be motivated to become involved in the company in order to develop new ways of doing business. Training became an integral part of the company’s changes so that they gained the necessary skills to achieve their goals.

The organizational change would be a difficult task, so Domtar established a compelling need for change. Since Domtar was in such a disastrous state, it made it easier for them to make the employees understand this need for change. Royer stated it is “ourselves” that have the capability to make the change. Domtar made changes at all three levels of the organization: at the organization level, the group level, and the individual level. Adjustments were made at the top level by introducing Kaisen. Implementation of Kaisen brought about change by helping groups interact with each other and also helped individuals within the group work together. Kaisen also educated the employees in what the mission, objectives and strategy of the organization would be and how they affected the employees. Domtar also showed their commitment by having management participate in employee training; not only providing guidance, but answering questions posed by the employees. Lower management received training also, in order to teach them how to address employee issues. After reading the case study, it is obvious that the changes at Domtar were successful. The case study does not seem to be addressed is how the organization was structures and how jobs were designed to meet the change.

The phases of the training model begin with the triggering event which was the needs analysis phase; followed by design, development, implementation and evaluation phases of the training model.