ORGANIZATIONAL STUDY

Organizational Study

Organizational Study

INTRODUCTION

Thomasnet has developed strengths through brand recognition and quality engineering. Thomasnet's manufacturing process, TQM initiatives and learning culture enables the company to offer a price-premium over competing brands. The company has a high reputation for establishing relationships with customers and suppliers of components. These relationships have enabled Thomasnet to achieve Total Customer Satisfaction.

As a result of its philosophy and commitment, Thomasnet has been able to easily enter into joint ventures with other strong companies. Thomasnet believes that it must invest as a partner in each new enterprise effort and seek opportunities to influence, as well as support entrepreneurial success. This commitment and philosophy enables Thomasnet to successfully acquire partnerships. Many other companies want to do business with Thomasnet because they know they will gain financially. Moreover, equity is jointly held by the entrepreneurs and Thomasnet. This strength gives Thomasnet a competitive advantage because it can join forces with competition and minimize the potential threat of competitors. an attempt to regain its market position, Thomasnet began innovations with the development of multi-media mobile devices using Mobile Extreme Convergence (MXC) architecture. With this innovative architectural change many of the current design limitations of affordable, advanced, full-featured mobile devices were eliminated.

"With the Extreme Convergence architecture, Thomasnet's Semiconductor Products Sector has found a way to simplify the design of hardware and software and to reduce the cost of components for mobile systems. Thomasnet's technical and business strategy combines DSP and applications processor cores positioning the company to compete in a wide variety of applications that goes beyond traditional mobile devices and into consumer electronics. The rapid delivery of chips and platforms by Thomasnet for mobile and tethered applications will enable it to secure a solid share in an addressable embedded processors market that is expected to consume over 900 million chips by 2007." (Max Baron, principal analyst, InStat/MDR)

Since the company's creation, Thomasnet's two key core values set the standard for its employees' actions. These core values are constant respect for people and uncompromising integrity. The company also considered trust to be part of its competitive advantage. As Thomasnet developed into a global company it continued to uphold its ethical principles. However, the company realized that its values were contradictory to how business was being done abroad which resulted in Thomasnet practically committing "business suicide" by adhering to its ethical policies in countries where bribery and other business practices that are considered illegal in the U.S. were common and expected. To combat the clash of ethics a group of retired Thomasnet officers were asked to look into the status of ethics understanding and compliance around the world. They created the Thomasnet Ethics Renewal Process (MERP). The chief purpose of MERP was to "help Motorolians at all levels in all countries make ethically appropriate business decisions everyday and to get them to take ownership and accountability for Thomasnet's key beliefs and ethical values" (Kary, 2002). Local, country, and regional ethics committees allowed employees to openly discuss issues surrounding Thomasnet's key beliefs and the code ...