Organisational Structures

A driver on a delivery round in Lima finds a customer's gate locked and nobody answering. He has two choices. He can leave the parcel with the neighbour and note it on the sheet, or he can call his supervisor, who calls the depot manager, who checks with the customer service team, who telephone the customer, and by the time an answer comes back the van is nine streets away. Nothing about that difference is a rule of logistics. It is a decision the business made months earlier about who is allowed to decide.

This lesson is about that decision and its consequences. You will learn to read an organisational structure the way an examiner does, counting spans of control and levels in the chain of command rather than admiring the shape. You will work out what changes when a business is tall rather than flat, what delegation actually transfers and what it does not, why delayering saves money and costs something else, and where the line between a centralised and a decentralised business really falls. Two of the four multiple choice questions on the November 2020 Paper 1 came from this single topic, so it is worth more marks than its three objectives suggest.