From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

TOP LEFT: Nancy Oliveira and
Suzy Tremblay on the pâté
line at the Tour Eiffel meatprocessing
plant. McCain owns
Tour Eiffel’s two plants, in
Blainville and in Quebec City.
TOP rIGhT: The Grand Falls
plant, built in 1979, makes
pizza, juice, and potato
products.
BOTTOM: Pizza line at Grand
Falls, 2007. Carol St. Amand
ensures the holder is filled with
salami, ready for automated
slicing onto the pizzas.
Ash had developed and implemented the Management Control Report (MCR) system
around the world. His successor, Bill Mabee, had guided regional directors of finance
and coordinated financial transactions and tax-related matters between them. Bliss
and Morris acted more or less as corporate officers, but the task of coordinating the
activities of the organization as a whole fell mainly to Harrison and Wallace.
By 1990, McCain Foods, with more than $2 billion in annual revenues, was too big
to rely on such an informal structure. Terry had the job of integrating and harmonizing
the financial affairs of McCain worldwide, a mandate that did not always make
him popular with managing directors used to doing things their own way. “There
had been other corporate people before me,” Terry explains. “There was Tony van
Leersum guiding people about potatoes and Tim Bliss, who was chief engineer. They
were the welcome corporate interveners. But I was the one who was changing things,
and that wasn’t particularly welcome.”
Terry’s mandate was not precisely defined. “I was to become the first CFO of the
company and find areas where improvements could be made,” Terry says. He started
out in areas where he had significantly more expertise than anyone else in the company.
One was information technology, a field in which McCain could learn from
other organizations of its size.
Secretaries were still using typewriters and the salesmen were taking their orders
in longhand. At a meeting with a group of salesmen, Terry said, “Why wouldn’t you
have a portable computer with all the data about your customers on it? You could
take the orders on it and transmit them automatically.”
A salesman replied, “I will never take a computer into one of my customer’s establishments.
They will think I’m spying on them.”
A few months later, Terry convened the Canadian management team to watch a
film made for Frito-Lay, the snack food company, showing its sales force using handheld
computers. The McCain management soon realized that it was time to enter the
digital age if the company was to continue its success.
Terry’s most significant initiative was to hire Anil Rastogi in 1995 as chief information
officer, with a mandate to centralize information technology for the worldwide operation
in Florenceville. To explain the importance of this, Terry points to a system
McCain had installed across its worldwide operations, the Pansophic Resource
Management System (PRMS). This is an enterprise-wide management system that
allows the company to track all its order entry, distribution, production, and financial
functions from start to finish. The problem was that each of twenty-five separate
McCain businesses insisted that the system be modified so that none of their processes
changed. No one at head office had the ability or authority to prevent PRMS being
implemented in twenty-five different ways. Rastogi developed a world version of the
system, and it was implemented over the objections of many of the regional offices.
Terry needed the support of Wallace and Harrison to implement his projects,
and that didn’t always come automatically. He recalls how he managed to change
Harrison’s mind about an initiative that was finding resistance with the European offices.
Terry wanted to bring in a centralized finance group in Europe to take on more
responsibility. The managing directors in Europe saw this as an infringement on their
autonomy. Wallace supported the move, but Harrison was resisting it because of opposition
from the European executives.
Over Scotch one night in Harrison’s office, Terry asked, “Harrison, how long have
you been running the business?”
142 f rom the Ground up
the home front 143
TOP LEFT: Winnipeg mayor
Bill Norrie presents Harrison
and Wallace with honorary
citizen’s awards, 1979.
TOP rIGhT: Official opening
of the Prince Edward Island
plant, 1991.
BOTTOM: Anil Rastogi, chief
information officer, McCain
Foods Limited, 2006.