Simmons Case Essay

476 Words2 Pages
Leading Change at Simmons Challenges faced by Simmons The Simmons Manufacturing Company, as it was known to be by 1889, was formed by Zalmon Gilbert Simmons. The company, since its early times had a reputation for innovation in its products. It focuses on production of high quality and pioneering mattresses. Simmons had a very profitable history but started facing problems from the year 1978 onwards. In 1978, Simmons had the first non-family member, Theodore Greeff, elected as the CEO of the company. From that time onwards, Simmons had many different people operating it as its owners. This caused the company to become unstable and have no long term vision. The company went through several ups and downs during that period. Multiple divisions were added and then removed from the company and it eventually settled down focusing on what it did best; making mattresses Simmons started experiencing lack of coordination and motivation amongst the employees during its “downfall period”. Instead of working towards a common goal, there was competition amongst the different manufacturing plants. An innovation in cost savings or efficient production procedures discovered by one plant was not shared with the other plants. Moreover, the terrorist attacks of September 11th made the situation for Simmons even worse. U.S. economy suffered greatly after that incident. That made three of the biggest customers of Simmons, namely Montgomery Ward, Heilig Meyers, and HomeLife, declare bankruptcy. These companies contributed $110 million of the $658 million of Simmons sales revenue. That makes up about 16.7% of Simmons total business. Nothing was going Simmons’ way. One of the raw materials integrated into Simmons products started to give off a bad smell after some time. This made severe adjustments to be made in the production schedule and further impacted the profitability of the

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