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Organizational Structure: Functional and Horizontal

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Identify and describe how one of the basic organizational structures (functional) was either successful or unsuccessful at your present or former organization, or an organization you are familiar with.

What were the key factors for determining the level of success or failure for this structure?

Select a different basic organizational structure (horizontal) for the organization you identified above and predict its level of success or failure. Explain your rationale.

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Solution Summary

This solution discusses from a personal view an organization the topic of functional vs horizontal management for this company. This has one reference but is related to describing functional organizational structure.

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Identify and describe how one of the basic organizational structures (Functional) was either successful or unsuccessful at your present or former organization, or an organization you are familiar with.

The Functional Organizational structure is normally formulated as follows:
President is the top
Departments are: Marketing, Finance, Production, Human Resources, Technology
Under those departments:
Marketing - Sales, Research, Advertising
Finance - Credit, Finance Acquisition, Accounting
Human Resources - Benefits, Wage and Salary, Training, Hiring
Production: Machine Processing, Inventory, Assembly

Knowing this is the structure of the Functional Organization - the industry this best fits is manufacturing. This works very well with manufacturing because the key to the business is high sales that results in high production. The sales department in the organization I worked for hired approximately ten sales representatives who traveled the entire United States. Each had an area to cover which was done in person and then by phone and by utilizing Skype technologies. Sales stayed high with this type of attention. The customer sales representatives at the office level took the calls and orders and then sent those to Production.

Production's job was to make sure inventory product was available or could be available with a quick turn-around for the orders.

Technology's part was to make sure the systems were up and running, applications were running at high performance, and that someone was always on-call for any issues that would arise.

The Pros and Cons in each department:

Sales:
PROS: What worked well for the company was the individualized attention in ...

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