3m Canada - Industrial Business Division

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- Firstly, 3M should break down the silos within its ranks among various divisions since 3M had always practiced bureaucratic way of managing its large organizational structure.

- They can use the opportunity of using some of its plant capacity to manufacture private labels that could provide an area of opportunity to fill up the vacant spaces in the MRO market. Although private label business would not enhance the 3M brand or its market share since the products would not be labeled under3 M, growths in sales volumes could be driven by private labels. Private label business could mean increasing 3M’s growth that would be consistent with 3M’s ambition to maintain existing business account and generating repeated transactions as their key indicators of sales performance.

- IBD could also use the option of outsourcing sales. Outsourcing sales could potentially reduce sales effort and increase 3M’s sales management efficiency in dealing with specific product lines and potentially reducing IBD’s cost to train product and customer sales expertise in marketing their product offerings.

- Steps for implementing recommendations:

It is important for 3M to implement these changes as it is very difficult to survive in this global economy to efficiently operate within the comfort zone of a company. They should 1st change their organizational structure so that they can make quick decisions. With a quicker decision-making process, there would be a definite improvement in fulfilling supply chain requirements, to adapt to product offering changes, customer expectations, and to maintain 3M’s competitive edge in servicing the emerging National distributors and the evolving MRO customers.

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