From functional organizations to product-oriented organizations; adesign methodology

摘要

Functional organization structures have been very common in themanufacturing industries. Manufacturing planning and control for afunctional organization however, is a very complex matter and was merelydone by rule of thumb (typically one week per process step perdepartment). Monitoring the progress during this year was virtuallyimpossible. Modern planning and control software is often thought of asa solution. Planning software usually fails to work properly if work inprogress monitoring cannot be implemented to the level of an individualwork order. Although functional organizations claim that they are veryflexible because they are not obstructed by fixed routings, in practicethey lack the means for managing product variety effectively. The demandfor shorter lead-times and better quality control has driven manymanufacturing organizations towards a product-oriented organizationmodel. Developments in flexible production automation and in productionplanning and control demanded more integration and this too pointed inthe direction of a product-oriented organization model. In this paper, abusiness process redesign scheme is introduced that tends to favor thedesign of product oriented organization structures. The key to thisscheme is that it designs organization structures that have an intrinsicmatch between the control instruments present in the organizationhierarchy and the natural control needs of the core process. The coreprocess is the process that contains the bare minimal functionsabsolutely necessary to fulfil the customers needs. The design approachis illustrated with a case