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Insight

Published December 2009

Sygma: Feeds and Succeeds on Slim Margins

  Daniel Margolis

The Sygma Network Inc. feeds America, every day. As one of the largest food service distributors in the United States, Sygma, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sysco and a Fortune 100 company, ships to chain restaurants across the country from 17 distribution centers. As such, Mike Miller, director of human resources at Sygma, has a lot of mouths to fill, so to speak, directing the talent management of some 33,000 employees. In speaking with Talent Management, Miller reflected on the mechanisms to best utilize a workforce in an industry that survives on slim margins and can be deceptively simple in its demands.

TM: Describe your company's approach to talent management.

Miller: Within our industry, the overriding characteristic is we have extremely low profit margins. That obviously has an effect on our talent management approach. It gets expensive if you're constantly looking on the outside, and so there are things that we have to do on the inside in order to make it cost efficient. Now, do we do all of the progressive stuff and all of the most cutting-edge things internally? We don't, and part of that's driven also [by] our low profit margins, so we have to do what we can with what we have — a combination of outside versus inside. We have some programs internally. We have a benchmarking succession plan that we cover with our senior management group a couple of times a year, and we rely on the vice president and general management of the centers to help us update those documents and make sure that we're focused on those people that have a lot of potential — make sure that we're giving them opportunities to grow within the company. On the other hand, we also do look outside because our industry is somewhat customized, and we've found that we generally have the most success with people that have some experience with food.

TM: What processes or programs have you established to improve the performance of the entire workforce?

Miller: We've been on this system through DDI for probably the last eight to 10 years. It's called Coaching and Maximizing Performance. It's a program that Sysco espouses and, as a subsidiary, we espouse as well. And so we lean pretty heavily on that [for] performance management within the company, all the way down to our supervisors and our clerical folks. The system starts with the goals of the CEO and bleeds down to the goals of each of our individual centers. We have 17 distribution centers around the country that are their own empires, if you will. And so, in order to make sure that everybody's firing on the same cylinder, the president and CEO and senior management group out of our corporate office here in Columbus, Ohio, at the beginning of the fiscal year will complete a performance plan for themselves. They'll share that performance plan with each of the 17 center presidents, vice presidents or GMs, and those folks will take that performance plan of the overall company and bleed it down into their individual centers, all the way down to the supervisors. You have the CEO saying, "We have to make $32 million this year." And ultimately that can translate down to a warehouse supervisor in Detroit saying, "Well, if everyone else is doing what they're supposed to be doing, what I need to do is reduce my accident frequency here in this Detroit warehouse by a certain amount." That ultimately rolls up to the CEO's $32 million if everybody around the country is doing something similar.

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