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Team wins award for best contribution to merger and acquisition integration
Keywords: Organizational change, Human resource management, Quality awards, Brewing
Employees are rarely happy with uncertainty and at UK brewer and pub chain The Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries plc (W&DB) they had experienced more than their fair share.
Over a period of less than three years, the company took over two breweries and itself had to fend off the attentions of two other firms. Some 750 jobs were lost and the process of integrating very different organizational systems and processes was begun.
Against this difficult background the W&DB has turned around employee attitudes and achieved high rates for employee satisfaction, motivation and commitment. The human resource (HR) initiatives behind these changes won the company a commendation for the best HR contribution to merger and acquisition integration award in the 2004 Human Resource Excellence awards.
The background
W&DB recognized in the late 1990s that, in order to generate growth in a mature market, it had to acquire other complementary businesses. In February 1999, after a hostile takeover battle, the company acquired Marston, Thompson & Evershed pic (Marstons), based in Burton on Trent, with a brewery and operating pubs mainly in the east Midlands, north-west of England and north Wales.
Later that year, W&DB acquired the Mansfield Brewery through an agreed bid. This brought with it another brewery, more local beer brands and an extensive estate of managed and tenanted pubs, as well as valuable free-trade business in the east Midlands and south Yorkshire.
As a result, W&DB doubled in size within 12 months. It became the UK's leading independent brewing and pub-retailing business, and one of the top 300 quoted companies in the country.
Labor represented more than one-quarter of the company's costs, so it was obvious that most of the savings from the takeovers would be on employment costs. For the 12 months following each acquisition the HR team concentrated on achieving the cost-saving targets. HR played a key part from the start, with Steve Rowlands, group HR director, being a member of the senior steering group that was set up to plan and oversee the acquisition process.
W&DB achieved total cost savings of just over £30,000,000, of which £20,000,000 were employment-related. This...