Let’s face it developing a clear, satisfactory organization chart is no easy job, especially when the organization is family owned and small to medium sized.

Compared to a large sized tier 1 automotive supplier, the small to medium sized organization would have the same basic processes, that is top management, sales / order handling, APQP, personnel management, logistics, production, quality control, metrology, audit and quality system management, documentation and information control. 

What is different between the former and the latter is that, while the former would have – in most cases – clearly identified each process owner, in the latter we would have one ‘head’ owning more than one process.

AUDITING CHALLENGES
There are – from auditors’ point of view – the following difficulties, that are practically always found in small and medium sized organizations supplying car makers or their suppliers:

• One: there’s no clear distinction between customer oriented processes, management processes and supporting processes, thus creating confusion in evaluating processes’ criticality and priority of ‘do’s and act’s’; the effects of this confusion are even more severe in so far that process metrics are not tailored to process’s criticality and priority.
• Two: in small and medium sized organizations job descriptions reflect process ownership and there understandably is no one-to-one relationship between process and process owner.

But here things are made worse by the fact that job descriptions are kept generic to make process responsibility and authority fit the owner’s characteristics, and not vice-versa, as it should be.

Even in an one hundred people staffed organization, I’ve often found key personnel with the same family name, who are obviously relatives ‘owning’ different processes, often interacting with one another.

No doubt, all of them do their best to make the organization perform at its best; but as expected family friction can bias the process flow.

It has generally been given a negative meaning to the concept of nepotism.

I’m quite against this interpretation.

Examples of ‘nepotism’ can also be found in multinational organizations, in which the  criteria for selecting personnel would be expected to be more objective and skills-based.

At the same time, I’m quite against top managers who trumpet that “our organization is a great family.”

ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY
Organizational clarity usually links to organizational effectiveness.   I don’t mean it would result in organization success, but it would certainly reduce organizational waste in terms of improving internal and external communication.

And this could result in a new, big, customer with  additional profit.

Organization customers, especially the big ones, now look first at the organization’s ‘organization’, of which an organization chart is a first hand representation.

When the organization chart presented to the customer is not satisfactory, the customer will dig deeper and deeper into the organization, and, sooner or later, the customer will find holes, sometimes big holes.

So, let’s care much more about our organization’s organization chart, job descriptions, skills matrices and what follows, and make sure that what we show our customer it’s not only paper.

Because the product quality is an output of the organizational quality.