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The dream’s door: A case of an MNC in Poland
Question 1-
Discuss the standardization of organisational activity in DAK. Then critically assess whether standardization should have been implemented as opposed to localization.
Answer-
The starting of business was very smooth in Poland for DAK. Since it operates in manufacturing automobiles, learning the trends of the country is a very important thing. But Poland fared very well in this regard, where the plant was manufacturing the second largest number of automobiles (158,000 per year), right after Fiat (A German
and which was producing 522,600 units per year). DAK selected Gliwice because they knew they could find very cheap labour in the small town, as the coal mining crisis had left people unemployed. The move to Poland was an important tactic, to proceed into central Europe and explore unknown te
itory. Also the area was a growing hub for automobiles. Now this area was new to DAK, so they maintained their conservationist approach of standardization in plant setup, talent acquisition and training. Another reason for this was, for a long time, although the factory was in Poland, the marketing, PR and other administrative work was handled by the central headquarters in Germany. The standardization starts with the definition of “Quality” being uniform across all DAK units. But this kind of standardization approach to quality made the Poland
anch to get numerous quality certifications, which later helped their manufactured cars get the global accreditation they needed.
It cannot be unanimously concluded that DAK had a localization or standardization approach when they opened up a
anch in Poland. The case clearly mentions the fact that the expats who a
ived in Poland, wanted to run the office and recruit such people, who could
ing a westernized standard in the unit, thus making them different from that of the general units in Poland. Thus what they did was, they had a huge pool of candidates compete for a few posts. This
ought out the best in the people, and the youngest, most enthusiastic employees got selected. They desired people who had no prior experience, who could easily be moulded in to delivering the needs of the company. While working in different contexts, HRM under any circumstances has an internal and external part to it. Internal refers to the structure and demographic factors while external refer to legal factors and also the type of economy in picture. Here the focus was more on the external part of it. Also when critically analysing on the basis of Convergence vs. Divergence theory, the company was looking towards convergence in many aspects of running business in Poland.
Along with the recruitment of the people, the setting up of the plant was also going on. Since the employees recruited were naïve, mostly studying or with little or no experience, they listened to their superiors and thus applied their learnings, which were retained from western concepts. Thus standardization can also be seen in their plane set-up. The fact that the automobiles manufactured in the plant were of superior quality, convinced the poles that all their products were not “trashy”. Thus, having a standard approach across quality actually helped the company to set themselves apart from the rest of the products which were cu
ently being manufactured in the Polish nation.
Training of employees is an important aspect of any company (Mendenhall, Dunbar and Oddou, 2006). In this scenario, localization came into picture for DAK. Unlike other plants, where the trainees visited different plants to gain experience and knowledge, in this case the newly developed green plant was used as the on-job training spot for all the employees. This actually made them masters of their own field, and they became experts of the operations in their plant. But some people who were consequently visiting the other European plants as well realized that the polish workers lacked method and practise. The problems arised from here when the company decided on training the company with Lean manufacturing techniques. This technique had been very famous in Japan, especially with Toyota and helped them manufacture better quality automobiles at a cheaper price than their competitors. The Polish workers were unaware and had never heard of this technique, which was pretty new as a concept in the early 2000s. But learning started to happen mutually with a trial and e
or basis. Along with manufacturing, there was going to be a huge cultural shift in the
anch as well, with the Japanese concept of quality being taught to the employees. The way in which the company operated was also very open, with a lot of scope for negotiation. Around 80% of the projects and files were...