If you never worked for a big Multinational corporation, you might believe the organizational arrangement is not important. Surely, there is your boss, there is his boss and up and up and if you are a supervisor or manager, you will find your subordinates, perhaps they also have their acquaintances. You could have a similar sort of experience from your little company where you worked until today.
However, if you are going to enter the corporate world you may meet very different organization schemes. If, on the other hand, your company has been only purchased by one big multinational, you can bet that there will be significant changes in the business and you are better able to find your way from the organizational jungle. Big businesses have long ago recognized that conventional Hierarchies of a functional organization cannot work efficiently in a massive company. They mostly adopted a strategy that occasionally is called hybrid, occasionally matrix organization. This pattern favours a prevailing operational hierarchy depending on the demand of the company.
This ensures that customer demand is flowing through the business and being implemented in a pragmatic manner with the least of organizational resistance that often occurs in operational organizations. Let’s see an example. You understand the traditionally distinct objectives of sales and production. Sales want products instantly available as the client wants them. Production wishes to produce in huge quantities to inventory and needs forecast from sales that they are not able or not willing to give as the clients change their needs frequently.
Both departments fight each other constantly and blame the other party for not fulfilling customer demand or required outcomes. Sales push for frequent manufacturing program changes and short lead times and production requires large stock and resists changing production program according to customer requirement thus hugely increasing communicating with influence. Well, clients always want something that is not on stock, and they need it instantly. In a typical large operational organization, this unsolvable issue seriously reduces the competitiveness and efficiency of the organization.
Instead, a company built around client demand fosters customer-focused teams in which the production is currently serving the earnings requirement as straight as physically possible. On the other hand, production is getting Information from its sales persons always and is adapting it back into their Planning system so as to be capable of reacting on short notice. Production Procedures are designed so that manufacturing changes are natural, regular and are Part of this machine production runs are just as big as immediate future customer demand requires.