MGT 301 SLP INSTRUCTIONS WEEK 3: Organising at Wal-Mart Supercentres

Organising at Wal-Mart Supercentres
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Sam Walton first founded the Wal-Mart Empire as a small company back in the year, 1962 and later on in 1969 it was incorporated. With its head quarters in Bentonville in Arkansas, today the company is the top retailer globally only coming second in the public corporation category. Although the corporation is half owner by the family and thus run as a family business, it employs more than two million persons at the global scale. To get to the global status, Wal-Mart has applied the functions of management at great length. Managing a small company as was the case with Wal-Mart when it first graced the industry, is rather different than managing a corporation that has more the two million employees spread across more than 8000 stores globally. The organising function of management has been at the fore front of making sure that the company stays at the top of the league. The organising function comes after the planning stage and relates to the aspect of managing the human, financial and the physical resources within Wal-Mart. This is the function that bridges the gap between the responsibilities that are given to the various heads of authority at different capacities and the authority itself. As such, it concerns itself with the results that are to be achieved. As part of its division, Wal-Mart started the supercenters, which in essence are hyper super markets, covering land areas of over 200,000 square foot and offering all the commodities and services that all the other discount stores do.
Work specialization
This is one of the elements, that involves the identification of the various specific jobs that have be carried out and then determining the persons that are best fit to carry them to fulfilment. At Wal-Mart there are thousands of stores and millions of employees to manage. To effectively manage such a large number of employees at it supercenters, it has resulted to specialization of the various functions within each f the stores. This aspect is associated with high efficiency and accountability is much easier as one can pinpoint the exact time and point that the process of offering the services was flawed. As the workers have their specific job description well cut-out for them, they develop expertise, which has led to natural growth at the corporation.
Departmentalization
As part of Wal-Mart’s supercenters organization, work specialization required that the various specialized units of the staff have departments. These are logical units that form part of the whole process at the supercenters. To the managers it becomes much easier coordinate and control each and every unit as separate entity as well as assessing those that not performing as expected. Each unit is regarded as a company unit, which actually has its own costs and profits to balance. At the supercenters, there are various types of departmentalization that can be established, all of which are driven by effectiveness and customer satisfaction. One is the process departmentalization, where the various processes at these centres are divided into units that can easily help identify faults in the entire store, and therefore assist in the choice of the improvement efforts. There is the functional departmentalizati...