Thai company counts its chickens

I like stories like this. If there is a pandemic, while some places will do very badly, many places will find a way. I say "if there is a pandemic," but if you are poultry producer in southeast asia the pandemic has already happened, where it is a panzootic, a pandemic in animals (in this case birds). Thailand has one of the largest poultry export sectors in the world. When H5N1 hit Thailand, its sixth largest poultry producer, Sun Group was in trouble. Twenty-five countries in the EU, almost its sole market, put a ban on fresh chicken imports from Thailand, leaving it without customers and a lot of workers to be paid. What Sun's six subsidiaries did then is quite remarkable.

Taweesak Jiwawattanawanit, export sales manager of Sun Food International who entered the company shortly before the shock, recalls the nightmare. "We had to stop our hatching-house operation for eight weeks, while our animal feed plant had to slash its production volume by 70 per cent. Our slaughterhouse stopped operation for one and a half months."

He said that in that year the company suffered a loss of Bt2 billion, due mainly to the bird-flu crisis, coupled with declining chicken prices in the world market. Above all, Sun Group had responsibility for 4,000 employees, which was indeed a heavy burden for the company.

Instead of cutting the staff numbers to reduce costs - as many giant firms did when faced with the crisis - Sun Group decided to keep them all. And the strategy has paid off by boosting their loyalty.

"At that time we thought we had to survive. So high-ranking executives to low-level staff talked about it together to find a solution," says Taweesak.

The first move was to transfer hundreds of blue-collar staff to work in one canned-food facility in Kanchanaburi province where it had good connections. Fortunately, the canner was in need of additional employees to enhance its production line.

It also joined forces with the giant consumer-product firm Sahaphat Group, with which it also had good ties, to allow some employees to be temporary salesmen of Sahaphat products. (The Nation [Thailand])

The workers' brains and experience weren't idle, either.

"We found that staff had many good ideas, but our old working style didn't give them an opportunity to share them," admits Somkiert.

As a result, the company began to promote a new working atmosphere by encouraging staff to share ideas and communicate more with their supervisors, he says.

In addition, it created a welfare system for employees. One example is the creation of facilities for workers, such as a nursery in one of its plants.

Somkiert says offering welfare to the staff does not add to costs, as he knows how to manage the budget efficiently.

With ideas from the workers, Sun created whole new product lines for the Thai market, calling on their employees to help with product design and production methods. It has regained much of the lost industry position, but done it without a fatal total dependence on the export market. Its managers now are not so concerned about their ranking in the Thailand hierarchy, however:

"Being a giant company and ranked among top exporters is not our main goal. What we want to be is a company that serves good Thai products for local people and people globally. The most important thing is, we want to be a company with happy employees," he adds with a big smile.

This almost sounds like a story too good to be true, and if I were more of a cynic I'd look for a way to debunk it. I'm cynical, but I hope appropriately so. I've seen enough of people under pressure to know that often they come through, more often than when they crack.

The better prepared you are the more likely you are to come through when it matters. And when it matters, remember the Thai chicken producers.