Business Scenario
Longtau Technology is a Chinese enterprise that design, manufacture, sell and support computer network equipment. It has successfully entered the European market using UK as the European headquarters. In the enterprise network market, it has a network of 40 distributors across UK, Germany, France and Spain, annually selling 10,000 network switches to business customers. It has also built up a market for small business, home use and is selling 500,000 SOHO routers and repeaters annually through retail and direct channels in the UK. In the retail channels(similar to Tesco, PC World), the first line support related to sales and returns is managed by the retailers. Longtau provides support on technical issues. With the direct channels(similar to eBay, Amazon and own web shop), Longtau provides all the support to customer interactions
The Managing Director(MD) arrived from China 15 years ago to start the Longtau European office in UK. The operation procedures from the China headquarters were used when the UK office was set up.
The UK office currently has 150 employees. The organisation is structured as follows: 3 directors – MD, Operations, Sales, and 2 senior managers – Finance & HR. Beneath each senior manager/director are a number of direct reports, this layer of middle management total 20. The three main function groups are the call centre, sales order processing, technical support. The MD, Finance Manager and 8 of the direct reports came from China and have close link with the head office. About 80 employees are UK Chinese persons, who speaks Chinese and are UK residents, having been in UK for many years.
Each function has its departmental information system to support its work. These systems were developed in China and used in the Chinese head office, with the UK version translated for the UK use.
The rapid expansion of the business was achieved by giving the head of each function the authority to grow. The result has been that the three parts behave as very independent units and gained different operations culture.
There have been a lot of complaints that customer issues were lost between the call centre and the sales department, resulting in lost sales and late customer deliveries. There are increasing complaints that the SOHO customers do not receive technical support to get their equipment working. This is being picked up by the PC magazines.
The situation is being noticed by the Group HQ in China, and the MD is very keen to find a solution to the problem quickly.
You are engaged by the Longtau UK as external consultant to explain the company’s problems and propose improvements.
