The Challenge: Achieving efficient operation

Genaral Manager: Joram Madnack

Marine World Brands Group (MWB Group), headquartered in Paris, is a leading European seafood manufacturer. The Group operates its business primarily in the markets of the U.K., France, Italy, Ireland, and the Netherlands. While generally selling canned goods such as tuna and high-value-added products, the Group produces and sells a wide range of products including salmon, mackerel, sardines, and seafood paste. With over 600 million Euros in sales and 5,000 employees, it is one of Europe's leading companies.

MWB Group has a total of four production bases in Europe and Africa, one of which is IOT, a company located in Seychelles, a beautiful island nation in the Indian Ocean. Seychelles is comprised of 115 islands, some 1,300 km away from the African continent, and has developed through its tourism and fishing industries.

IOT in Seychelles manufactures high-end and popular lines of canned tuna sold at major European supermarkets and also produces private-brand products.

Despite IOT's prosperity, its General Manager Joram Madnack, who moved to IOT from an accountant position in a global auditing firm, always wanted to increase the efficiency of the company's operation.

Against this backdrop, the management of Thai Union Frozen (TUF), the parent company of MWB Group advised requesting JMAC's support when they visited IOT. Thailand-based TUF in fact had implemented an approximately three-year Company-wide Strategy Deployment Project since 2010 with the support of JMAC.

Finally started!

Soon after the introduction of IOT's Company-wide Strategy Deployment Project, JMAC's chief consultants, Tsuneyuki Ishida and Yasuhiko Izumimoto visited IOT in Seychelles in July 2012. They had a meeting with all members of IOT's management and first presented the overview of the Company-wide Strategy Deployment Project. Madnack subsequently described IOT's strategy, management indicators, conditions of meeting bodies, decisionmaking methods, etc., and major issues of the company. Chiefs of functional divisions were also individually interviewed on the current situations and issues, and IOT launched its Company-wide Strategy Deployment Project.

Madnack recalls this time: "I determined to start the project because I learnt the project included goal-setting and thorough execution. They always thought about the entire organisation and adequately tried to understand all processes including unloading of fish from vessels, refrigeration, fish sorting, cooking, processing, and packaging. They would then visit, observe, and check the conditions at the factory each time they stayed for consulting after that."

He assesses this project as follows: "The aspect of JMAC's consulting style that I value the most is that it starts with the commitment of the entire company. I was of course committed to achieving the management goals as the General Manager. We assigned the goals to the chiefs of functional divisions such as production, engineering, quality, commercial and so forth. The goals were further assigned to supervisors and general employees, and the activities were initiated when all employees understood the goals, which created a strong sense of trust."

"I think the Company-wide Strategy Deployment Project shares some aspects in its concept with Policy Management that used to be common in Japan," Izumimoto says. "IOT's members continuously strived to achieve their goals by uniting the entire company. While the last Japanese books on Policy Management were published in the 1990s, I think it has been practiced more seriously in the U.S. and Europe since then."

Milestone Celemony in September 2013

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