Describe Darling's old organizational structure and give reasons for introducing changes

Since Fountain Foods bought 30 per cent more of Darlings’ shares James Brady became the new Managing Director of the company. Following to his promises Brady began to analyze the company’s system and started with its organizational structure.

By that moment Darling’s structure had been organized by a functional principle. The company had 3 departments, and 3 directors reported directly to the Managing Director, J. Brady.

The first department, Sales and Marketing one, was headed by David Edwards who was responsible for domestic sales, export sales, advertising and marketing policy. The department was subdivided into 4 divisions. General sales division was headed by Robert Lee whose official responsibilities were organizing and controlling sales in Britain and overseas. He was assisted by Elaine O’Reilly as she was in charge of exactly organizing and controlling export campaigns. At the head of Marketing division there was Lewis Keane who was responsible for organizing and directing marketing policy. Steven Crawshaw was in charge of directing and organizing of advertising policy. It should be noticed that actually divisions were engaged partly in the same activities. in fact they weren’t working efficiently. The second department was Administrative with Richard Elvin at the head of. He was engaged both in production and finance spheres and his competence covered the matters from shipping raw materials, the process of production of different brands and their finishing to their packing and packaging, warehousing and transportation, and moreover all finance matters. Several people worked under his command, they were master confectioners, warehouse manager and cocoa&sugar buyers. Master confectioners included Andrew Donaldson and Jeremy Roberts who had been working for the company for the longer time than other employees; Susan Atkinson and Thomas Arnott. The matters of buying raw materials were in the competence of Adam Smith and Simon Delaney: they organized and controlled cocoa and sugar purchase. And the head of Warehouse division, Douglas Cooksey was in charge of organizing, controlling and directing warehousing and transportation of ingredients and finished goods. This department had several hindrances including the fact that 3 managers were close to their retirement at the same time and soon the company would have to search for somebody to replace them; and the lack of any separate financial division which was highly necessary for such a large company as it gather financial data, solves all the questions and matters concerning finance, gives an opportunity for potential and actual customers to get information about the financial situation in the company to decide whether it’s profitable to deal with or not. Because of that the administrative director had to undertake extra duties and responsibilities as a finance director.

And finally, there was the third department headed by Personnel director Pauline Dormer. Her official duties concerned recruitment and training labor force.

In accordance with this organizational structure the company had not very many departments and divisions, so it was easy enough to run, control it. Managerial staff wasn’t too large and the risks of bureaucracy were smaller. Probably this system would be appropriate for a small business like a partnership, but exactly not for a big company. Anyway this structure obviously had several disadvantages. Unclear chain of commands, several divisions partly fulfilling the same functions, the lack of necessary departments made Brady to conduct a reorganization.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14