Dashman Case

The Dashman Company is a manufacturing firm which is involved in supplying equipments to the armed forces in the United States. Earlier the company followed a decentralized purchasing mechanism where each of the 20 plants was encouraged to operate as an individual unit. But recently company was facing a difficulty in securing essential raw materials which may be due to the various environmental factors for example as per the described time period of case, it is quite possible that the demand for their products had increased due to the second world war. So, Mr. Manson, the president has hired Mr. Post as the VP, Purchasing in order to centralize the purchasing mechanism. Upon joining, Mr. Post has come up with the proposal that all plants had to notify the head office regarding the orders above $10,000 one week prior to its signing date. He was advised by Mr. Larson, his assistant to have a conversation with the purchasing executives of the plants rather than just conveying them through letter, but he dismissed the suggestion giving his busy schedule as the reason and sent this letter to the plants.

Now there were two flaws regarding the implementation of this proposal which actually lead to its failure, first that this information was circulated to the purchasing executives just 3 weeks before the peak buying season thus their concerns regarding implementing these changes at that critical time were never taken into account. The other was that this decision was a sort of one-way communication and was made promptly without finding out the reasons of the problem. Hence the plant executives even upon replying positively to Mr. Post's letter never turned up with any notice to the head office regarding the purchases. Thus we can say that the way the proposal was communicated to the executives failed to make them have a Buy-In in this decision.

Hence the identified problem is regarding the implementation of the proposal given by Mr. Post which is in danger now due to the improper way and channel of communication that has led to the lack of buy-in feeling from the executives. Before suggesting alternative solutions for this problem, it is pertinent to analyze its cause and then work on it. The reason behind this improper communication is Mr. Post's assumptions that his proposal is the best to solve this problem and that the purchasing executives would have no problem following the new method. These assumptions seem to be the root cause behind his dismissing Larson's idea of any conversation with the executives.

Since now the peak buying season is already on, hence the alternatives that Mr. Post has to solve the company's problem are as follows:

* Arranging a meeting with the purchasing executives to listen to their problems, put across his own idea and then come up with action plan which would resolve the issue and which would be feasible for both.

Pros: The executives