ORGANIZATION THEORY AND PRACTICE
Organizational Analysis
Somachame
Prof: Terry O’brien
Azeddine Elhanaoui
12/10/2012
Word Count: 1578
Somachame is a steel production company. There products range between steel rods, pipes
and personalized buts of aluminum sheets. Their main customers are contractors
undertaking projects with great industrial capacities. All its operations are run locally and
all it raw materials are imported from overseas. This makes the companies organization
complicated. Efficient task management is key in the success of this company. It has been
running different mixes of centralized and mechanistic operations. As the company grew
over the past thirty years the chains of command grew bigger, the Hierarchy structure
became more complicated to support its size. Nonetheless, the operations still got the
products out of the supply chain and too the consumers in competitive fashion. Although
the range of products is very broad, the company only counts twelve administrative
positions, and sixteen labor oriented positions. This puts the company size well below
average. As a result the company is welded together strongly through a flat and centralized
organizational structure.
Span of Control in the company is strongly tied to the department’s responsibilities. Each
administrative department has its own set of core responsibilities. Their relative
importance to productivity defines the number of members necessary to run the operations.
The sales department is given high importance by the president so the Chief sales officer
has five members under his responsibility. His Span of control is a 1 to 5 ratio which is
above average in the business world (Span of Control, 2012). In contrast, the human
resources department isn’t given great importance due to the small scale of the company.
As a result it only counts one member therefore limiting the span of control one to one
ratio. In the more labor oriented departments, Span of Control is bigger because of the
workers take more breaks than in administrative jobs. As a result to increase productivity
there are two different teams that work separate shifts. As a result, although the transport
department only has five trucks to be run per day, there are ten full time employees under
the department manager. Hence, his Span of control is a 1 to 10 in total, but he is only
working on 1 to 5 per shift.
The Hierarchy structure of the company can be dubbed down to the different departments
and one head who is the president. All the departments respond to him, and this means that
the company maintains a flat but wide horizontal structure. One can say that his power is a
