Case study

Crown Worldwide Group

The challenge

Crown, headquartered in Hong Kong, provides transportation, relocation, logistics and storage services for organisations and individuals in 54 countries. They have achieved significant success and growth by adopting a highly localised and entrepreneurial approach for building a presence in each of these 54 countries.

They recently came to understand that in order to be a genuinely global player they needed to radically re-think their strategy. They needed to transform from a series of autonomous country-based businesses to one global organisation with a consistent, joined up approach for managing their global clients.

As part of this shift to a global enterprise they needed to strip out unnecessary duplication, co-locate common services to achieve economies of scale and design and embed consistent end-to-end processes and technology for all their key areas of activity.

The result

Ignite worked with Crown to develop a bold and imaginative new strategy for the organisation along with a road map for delivering this as quickly and effectively as possible. The business’s top 200 people were actively engaged in building and validating the strategy and through this there was widespread approval and support for the way forward. A subsequent employee engagement survey revealed unparalleled levels of support for the leadership team and the future direction for the organisation and a commitment from staff to play their part in ensuring success.

    A key outcome was the rapid progress of activity to support the delivery of the strategy, including:

  • Establishment of four new senior leadership roles to drive four new global business units
  • The effective onboarding of AT&T and Capgemini as outsourced providers
  • Acceleration of the centralisation of core customer service and support functions
  • Re-alignment of the existing budget and performance management systems to align with a global approach

What made it successful

  • Focus on results – Ignite played a crucial role in establishing commercial rigour and discipline in the process. We ensured that for every significant element of investment to deliver the strategy, there was a robust and agreed business case in place, including an evaluation of associated costs and benefits
  • Programme design – we developed a business case for change and a road map for each of six strategic themes that would underpin the global and business unit strategies
  • Programme delivery – Ignite designed and established the infrastructure and control for a global transformation programme, including; governance, reporting, resourcing and the management of interdependencies. We hard wired into their infrastructure the need for pace and rapid decision making
  • Operating model design – as an integral part of the global strategy we developed a set of bold and imaginative key design principles that inform every aspect of how the organisation works – helping establish global consistency, customer focus and collaboration.