ScottsMiracle-Gro: A Business in Transformation

The secret to nurturing a healthy plant is just the right combination of beneficial nutrients, water and growing media, working together to create ideal conditions for the plant to flourish.

Turns out that sort of collaboration is good advice for corporations, too — particularly those that create products that make the world greener and more beautiful, such as The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company.

Like most companies, Columbus, Ohio-based ScottsMiracle-Gro has long maintained an IT organization charged with supporting many departments and divisions with enabling technology. But as technology has grown increasingly intrinsic to associates’ daily productivity, ScottsMiracle-Gro needed to step up its game in aligning technology initiatives to corporate goals.

The home and garden products maker had attained close, collaborative relationships among some areas of the business over the last few years through the efforts of an internal team dedicated to that function, called Global Business Process Transformation. The group was charged with using processes and relationships to make the company more efficient, reduce risk, increase the speed of products to market and drive more effective performance, often through the effective application of IT.

But 18 months ago, there remained little alignment between IT and the sales team. Lack of daily interaction between the two meant few relationships among their associates and scant understanding within IT of how the sales function actually worked. Plus, the sales team was going through its own transition, with a then-new leader, Mike Lukemire, promoted to lead marketing and sales along with business development. (Lukemire has since been promoted to Executive Vice President, Chief Business Operations Officer.) Among Lukemire’s mandates in the sales position was to substantially improve the operational efficiency of ScottsMiracle-Gro’s sales function, which required restructuring the team to increase its operational focus.

“During my time here at the company, we have continued to remove silos and barriers to get the best from cross-functional teams,” Lukemire says. “With my role in sales, we had tremendous opportunities to improve the efficiencies of our team, but our structure, systems and processes weren’t able to help our associates to reach their potential.”

Lukemire created a new position of Vice President of Sales Strategy and Execution as part of that restructuring, and chose Troy Hayes from the sales organization to fill it. Hayes was asked to improve selling behaviors and communication flow between ScottsMiracle-Gro’s corporate team, customer teams and field sales organization.

“We needed to challenge the system and make changes that would dramatically advance our approach and drive our business,” says Hayes. “We needed the technical skills and analytical tools that would leapfrog our capabilities to state of the art. Mike Lukemire challenged us to think bigger, not accept mediocrity and overcome any barriers.”  

The Big Idea
When Scott Hendrick was promoted from his leadership position over the Global Business Transformation team to Senior Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Information Officer, he saw an opportunity to address not only the IT-sales gap, but gaps among IT, process and intra-business unit relationships across all of ScottsMiracle-Gro. His idea: merge the process transformation and IT groups together into a single organization, to become Business Transformation, aka BT. Its team of 112 associates would be dispatched across the global organization to help apply process and IT to those same efficiency and effectiveness goals that the process organization had been tackling on its own, with the added help of technology.

Among the newly formed BT group’s first challenges was to identify process and technology-related opportunities to enhance efficiency and, in turn, improve profitability. The sales team would be a perfect place to start.

Step one was to create a new function within BT dedicated to sales by diverting resources in a cost-neutral way from back-office support functions. Two managers with strong technical and collaboration skills were charged with helming BT leadership to find effective solutions for the front office functions of sales and marketing. Step two was adding several associates at the analyst level with strong web-based skills in the support function, focused on leveraging and developing light technologies that can be used to implement flexible, low-cost and quick-to-implement solutions.

So with both BT and sales reorganized to focus on efficiency, the two met to determine desired outcomes and how technology could help. Regular collaboration meetings help the teams continually prioritize solutions, with a bias toward quick wins, which leverage new technologies.

They came up with a list of projects and began digging in. Big projects included mobile sales force automation and integrated business planning and collaboration. They also planned some quick-to-implement, low cost initiatives, including a mobile app to speed the processing of product returns from customer stores back into the network. Another quick-win project was rolling out SAP’s BusinessObjects Explorer [BOE] solution that enables the sales force to use iPads to quickly “slice and dice” point-of-sale (POS), shipment and inventory information, so they can understand the business better and improve their decision making.

By implementing a mobile sales force automation solution from AFS Technologies, the company is expecting to quantify the POS gains coming from incremental in-store activities and compliance improvements at retail. Time savings are also expected to result from the implementation of real-time automation tools and reductions in unnecessary credits or deductions.

The integrated business planning and collaboration solution replaced 100 Excel-based spreadsheets used by various teams to plan and track sales promotions. This diffused approach had meant multiple handoffs from one person to the other, and it was challenging to ensure all plans were in sync. With the new solution, based on the Google Apps Engine, everyone works off the same set of information, driving consistency and efficiency.

“It helps our business leaders and operators leverage information to be more collaborative and has maximized synergies across our sales regions, customer teams, marketing and finance,” says Hendrick. “The better we are at collaborating, the better we can serve our customers through improved promotion management.”

Collaboration at the Root
While ingredients such as the right skills and technology are certainly invaluable, collaboration is the hallmark of the BT unit’s projects. In the sales force automation initiative, for example, “the teams have worked so closely and are so immersed in the activities, it is very difficult to initially determine who is BT and who is sales,” says Hayes. “That’s how aligned we have been. It’s a ‘ScottsMiracle-Gro’ project. BT and sales have served more as contributors and facilitators rather than project owners.”

The spirit of collaboration was evident one night about a year ago, when Hendrick and Lukemire were visiting sales associates in the Pacific Northwest just as they were piloting the SAP BOE solution to gain insights into the business.

“Over dinner one night, five or six associates led conversations of how each of them were performing relative to each other and discussed the insights into why they thought certain associates were realizing the most sales. Mike and I knew then that we had to roll the solution out to the rest of our sales force,” says Hendrick.

The success of the collaboration between BT and sales has taught ScottsMiracle-Gro some important lessons:

• Proactively retool for new skill sets and technologies. The industry will continue to change very rapidly, so IT organizations should ask, “What are we doing to stay relevant for our business partners?”
• Look for ways to fund more resources in high value areas by offsetting such costs in other areas within IT or from the business.  
• Ensure visible alignment and collaboration among the leaders to serve as the example. Make sure everyone shares the vision and is fully vested in achieving a clearly defined outcome.
• Identify the business leader who has full ownership of the project; without one the project shouldn’t proceed. This sets the expectation that the IT organization supports the business leader; not the other way around.
• To drive business ownership, adopt a financial approach in which business functions must pay for the implementation of their IT-related costs. This requires every business leader to ensure their money is well spent and facilitates project ownership.  

ScottsMiracle-Gro also works with the McChrystal Group and its CrossLead operating model to improve ScottsMiracle-Gro’s competency in aligning as a management team across the organization and effectively executing against strategic priorities.  

“This has been effective in helping our team work together and communicate, which is critical because we have leaders spread across numerous geographies,” says Hendrick. “We are now much better at sharing information, being transparent across multiple levels in the organization, and driving open dialogue on challenging topics in fewer meetings.”

The effort also helped eliminate some of the “meetings after meetings” that occur when people have only partial information or siloed perspectives, and establish a structured cadence for how and when to most effectively share and receive information. Better communication leads to increased trust and effectiveness among leaders, and therefore increased ability to effectively challenge conventional thinking and work together to tackle critical business challenges.

Of course, all the elements won’t coalesce into a successful collaboration if the people involved don’t have the right skills to approach the process. That’s where ScottsMiracle-Gro’s team development programs come in (see Growing Good Collaborators).

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Growing Good Collaborators

ScottsMiracle-Gro takes a unique approach to developing high-performing leaders, managers and associates. The BT team worked with the company’s HR department to develop a series of programs to ensure strong development programs for its associates (aka employees).

Leadership Assessment Center
This three-day program, kicked off in October 2012, provides associates with pinpointed feedback on their leadership strengths and opportunities, and serves as a starting point for their development plans. To get started, BT and ScottsMiracle-Gro’s HR department identified the key leadership competencies required to be successful in the company’s BT department, then partnered with Scitrain, Ltd. to create business scenarios to test each participant in these competencies based on behavioral observations. Each participant receives at least six coaching sessions with Scitrain professional coaches over the following six to nine months.

C.O.A.C.H.TM training
Another goal for ScottsMiracle-Gro’s BT business unit is to increase the skill level and effectiveness of managers to be better coaches, in turn improving morale, boosting retention and improving productivity. BT also wanted to make sure they were not relying solely on outside coaching to develop associates.
BT partnered with The Align Group to leverage their C.O.A.C.H.TM program in the first few months of 2013. By year’s end, a follow-up survey will evaluate where managers have improved and where there are still gaps. The training is offered to all managers in the BT department to ensure the same method and language for coaching is used for all.


Business Transformation University Leadership Program
About one-third of the BT department is enrolled in ScottsMiracle-Gro’s Business Transformation University Leadership Program, launched in December 2012. High potential associates are receiving 24 months of intensive, applicable leadership training. Participants break into small teams to work on long-term projects while strengthening skills such as cost leadership, entrepreneurship and communication. At the same time, each month BT’s leadership team alternates between providing training on people leadership and technical leadership topics.  This program is key to developing future leaders as part of ongoing succession planning efforts.

Business Transformation University (BTU) Technical Program
In August 2013, BT launched this program to provide about one-quarter of the BT associates with technical development, including increasing technology and process competencies. This program provides technical-oriented associates with the opportunity to gain both breadth and depth across applications and infrastructure technologies. It also offers hands-on experiences with new technology, including mobile and web development. Such efforts are key to position technical experts to leverage a broad range of technologies, as needed, to meet business needs in a dynamic market

Monthly BT Communication Meetings
Since April 2011, the BT department meets monthly to explain what is going on in the company and in the department.

External Targeted Training
BT allots funds annually for each associate to attend training that will help him or her improve technical or managerial/leadership skill sets in an area that his or her manager supports.