Organizing Function Of Management

Organizing Function of Management

The second of the four basic management activities is organizing. By setting up and implementing the correct organization form or structure for their size and their people, a company can fulfill its purpose and make the necessary profit to continue, or even to excel. These structures will more than likely change over time as the company grows and changes, but this is the 'nature of the beast' and what most of Corporate America have come to expect.

The most efficient way to set up a structure for organization and management is to evaluate their employees and utilize the strengths of some to make up for the weaknesses of others. They will find that by making sure that everyone is able to do their job, and just possibly likes doing their job, the process will run much more smoothly and everyone will show up to work more dependably.

Brian's Cabinets

The company I work for, Brian's Cabinets is a very small company still. However, as it is still small enough to be very flexible with its processes, it is also a successful company and one of the best respected in Central Oregon. There are a total of about 150 people in the entire company - the owner, 5 managers, 3 admin personnel (including myself), 8 salespeople, 4 engineers, 20 installation, and approximately 110 production/delivery workers. This is a rough estimate, as the number of production/delivery personnel tends to change very quickly. It is not an easy job and many find that they are just not cut out for it.

Physical assets

At Brian's, the tracking of our physical assets is mainly done by production supervisors. The supervisors for each section keep a running tally and do weekly counts on what they have and what they need in their area. These lists are given to our Purchasing Department (of one man) and he enters everything into the computer and reconciles what we have with what we should have and makes the necessary orders for the next week. After this information is balanced, the bookkeeper crunches the numbers and creates reports to give to the owner so he knows where the company is sitting at any given time in terms of profit and organization.

This structure works very well for us, as each section is small enough at this point that the supervisors are able to keep a close eye on materials and jobs. This makes doing inventory not such an overwhelming task and they are able to do it accurately every week. This also means that it is not an overwhelming task for purchasing, as he can usually enter the entire shop's inventory in about half a day. This structure will more than likely be changed as we continue to grow, which we are doing quite quickly, but for the moment, the efficiency is actually pretty impressive.

Monetary

Being a relatively small company also makes sales and job tracking much easier. We have a small sales staff that assists our clients in understanding what it is they want for the design of their home and the price range they are looking for. When plans are drawn up and approved by the client, it moves on to the engineering department to be put into a CAD program and exported to the saws and assembly machines. Copies are also distributed to the various departments so that the supervisors can check availability of material to fill the order and purchasing can ensure that whatever is missing is in house by the time the job is ready to ship to the client for installation. When installation is complete, the bookkeeper is informed so that she can do the job costing, billing and collections.

In this case,

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