Universal Parks & Resorts Transforms Its Supply Chain Team’s People Readiness

Universal Parks & Resorts (UPR) welcomes guests around the world to experience epic stories and exhilarating adventures in astonishing and immersive new ways. UPR had undergone significant change and restructuring in the five years prior to Protiviti’s involvement and as a result, supply chain team members were unclear about their roles and responsibilities. In addition, UPR was looking to modernize its supply chain function and wanted to understand if its workforce had the skills necessary to be successful with a new Integrated Business Planning (IBP) operating model. UPR was looking for a trusted partner to help it understand the optimal organization design needed to achieve operational efficiency and increase collaboration across the company. This would include the development of new business processes, an organizational restructuring strategy, and ensure role clarity.

Readying the organization for change

Protiviti partnered with Universal leaders from Product and Experiences, Global Merchandising, Supply Chain, and Human Resources and their respective teams, to assess the company’s readiness for the transformational journey and develop a strategic roadmap to help the organization reach its full potential. To prepare the company for its new IBP model, we determined these steps would be needed:

• Organizational effectiveness, including the development of organizational design models and redefining roles and responsibilities
• Activity analysis, including analysis of activities and capacities
• Skills assessment, including analysis of relevant knowledge and proficiencies

Organizational effectiveness

UPR wanted to understand if its current organizational structure was best suited to adopt integrated business planning and succeed in the future state. We helped the client go from a philosophical target operating model to an operational organizational design blueprint that’s ready for execution. Our team:

• Built organizational design scenarios that took into consideration UPR’s existing structure and added levels of accountability and escalation
• Created function-based RACIs, role-based RACIs, and an operational process chart with additional details of each function
• Developed skills inventories, including current and future skillsets per function and cross-functional skills
• Designed a skills assessment approach to align on key process considerations and decisions related to assessing the workforce

Ultimately, the models allowed for a clearer understanding of governance and reporting. The team felt the enhanced organizational design model presented would help them achieve their business objectives while also focusing on employee development.

Activity analysis

We took a deep dive into UPR’s operational activities and crafted an exhaustive activity analysis survey to illuminate the company’s task distribution, accountability hierarchies, and fragmentation levels. This survey was designed with input from various client team members and stakeholders within the organization, ensuring it captured a holistic view of current operations. This survey achieved a 100% completion rate thanks to the strong partnership between our team and client counterparts.

The data gathered shed light on the percentage of time spent on each activity, revealing both areas of efficiency and those needing improvement. A key aspect of our analysis focused on the top and bottom five activities based on the time allocation of respondents. We identified instances where single performers were shouldering entire activities — a precarious scenario posing potential risks for business continuity. We also discovered areas where duplicative work effort or crossover activities occurred, indicating opportunities for streamlining processes.

Skills assessment

For the organization to transform successfully, UPR needed to know if its workforce had the skills to adopt the new way of working. To accomplish this, we:

• Developed a tailored skills taxonomy based on UPR’s environment and functions
• Used Protiviti’s skills assessment methodology to scope, align, execute, analyze, and plan to operationalize the results of the survey
• Tested the skills assessment with a pilot group of stakeholders to gather feedback and adjust as needed
• Developed a tailored communication plan to ensure alignment and an understanding of the purpose, goals, and objectives of the skills assessment.

Generating results

With RACI designations for 80 processes and 40 roles across six supply chain functions in place, UPR is now poised for future supply chain growth. New job descriptions and personas are based on future state process maps and skills inventories Protiviti delivered. The company has a roadmap that operationalizes all of the people-related activities for its supply chain transformation and updated organizational design models to inform headcount considerations in the future state. Enhanced organizational design models are now based on skillsets that will be needed going forward, making the organization more adaptive to future hiring needs.

This engagement showed the strength of having a strong partnership between our team and the client. Understanding that we were on the same page, trying to improve the organization and help them achieve their full potential, alleviated concerns regarding an outside party assisting with the transformation. The various client teams were receptive, open, and honest in interviews and workshops as they look forward to a better and brighter future ahead. Throughout the engagement, we developed an important and deep level of trust with the executive leadership, which enabled us to ensure UPR was successfully executing the strategies that had been so carefully crafted.