Oracle Finances

When looking at the organization and what I have been able to identify with the companies staff I have determined that the best type of organizational structure that fits the scenario is the functional organizational structure. The SEITZ Corporation is a privately owned company that makes and distributes small to medium size plastics bottles and containers used in the food and dairy industry. This organization is a privately owned company that appears to be family owned. "Functional organizational structures are typically used in businesses that primarily sell and produce standard products." (Clements, 2009) Since the SEITZ Corporation focuses on plastics, the employees are doing the same functional duties, such as developing plastics and manufacturing there ideas. The company's expertise is in plastics and that is what the vision for the company's future resembles. The other fact about functional organizational structure that is true about SEITZ is that there projects appear to be internal projects rather than helping other organizations compete in there marketplace. The current project we worked on was building a new plant so that they as a company could grow. The last fact that stands out is that functional organizational structures tend to outsource a project or get subcontractors to work on areas that are not in their expertise. In this project we hired an Architect, Real Estate Consultant and General Contractor to buy and build the new Huntsville Plant. Our internal expertise was used to setup the plant's production plan, hire new employees and train them on what we do as an organization.

Some advantages to a functional organizational structure are reducing duplication and functional excellence. Reducing duplication has to do with specializing internally. Since the specialty is making plastics for the food and dairy industry the engineering team can share their ideas instead of duplicating the same designs or manufacturing teams avoid making the same mistakes because they share their problems they may have run into. Teamwork plays a critical part in functional excellence but by focusing on a particular area of business with the company as a whole helps to manufacture quickly and come up with new ideas daily.

Some disadvantages to this approach are slow response time, lack of customer focus and insularity. Slow response time could be due to the fact that your expertise is on site and if you run into an issue that are new and it could go through several different departments before someone will claim the problem. Lack of customer focus can happen because the company is a private company they look out for what's best with the company rather than the project they are working on or customer's needs. Of course they are not going to ignore the customers' needs but what is important to them in this situation is to build the product for as cheap as possible and sell it