Case Studies of Pfizer and Flextronics



Human Resource Management Transformation of Flextronics and Pfizer

Introduction

Pfizer is a multinational pharmaceutical corporation which comes amongst the world's leading and innovative pharmaceutical companies. It has the diversified global health care portfolio based on the vast range of health care products such as medicines and vaccines (Pfizer, 2013). The company met with the rapid success soon after selling its own products since 1990. This sudden success encouraged it to increase its business operations and workforce up to a high level. This was the point when the company realized of transforming its HR functions to be more successful in the competitive environment.

Flextronics is the largest global electronics manufacturing Services Company which also offers design, manufacturing, distribution, and aftermarket services. It offers the manufacturing and related services to leading electronic companies. It develops full range networking and telecommunication systems and equipments to many companies. The company holds unique abilities to solve most challenging problems of clients faster and more efficiently as compared to other companies in the market (Flextronics, 2013). The top customers of Flextronics include Dell, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, and Xerox.

Discussion

Challenges Experienced by the Organizations

Pfizer also restructured its traditional human resource functions into the contemporary one which can significantly be able to respond to the changing business needs in the exceptionally competitive environment. The company realized that the business must be designed in a way that it can deliver the best outputs across the business to achieve the greatest results. It also recognized that the HR must be having the ability to drive the business strategy through the high impact HR work. The company experienced the need after the Pharmacia acquisition due to the striking operational chaos. This acquisition resulted in the different HR practices, systems, payroll practices, compensation plans, and different point of views of both companies. This led towards the overly large HR functions that were difficult to handle and unable to deliver quality services (Altizer and Bolden, 2009). These business realities of the company to adapt to the smaller and synchronized scale, represent the inefficiencies of the business, which came in front in 2007.

Flextronics is the $33 billion company that transformed its strategic HR from the very scratch when it recognized the role of human resource management as the vital constituent of the organizational success. The company acknowledged that the organizational capabilities are actually concerned with the leadership, customer connectivity, and efficiency. The company acknowledged that the growing market demands more sophistication and more quality, which caused it to overview the entire business from the different perspective. This caused the company to recognize that the creation of new business model would help in sustaining efficiently in the industry and to better meet customer requirements. In this concern, the company conducted the leadership survey which acknowledged that the significant barrier to their success was the lack of strategic HR function (Ulrich et al., 2009). This led them to consider that their HR functions were not strategically aligned with the business ...