Creating An Organizational Chart

In order to maintain strong relationships with your vendors and others, it is a smart idea for you to consider creating a strong organizational chart. What does an organizational chart offer to your company? It clearly defines your relationships with vendors along with other things as well like your relationships with your customers and how a product moves from a raw good into a finished product. This allows you to see areas that you may need to address if you are having cost related issues.

A manufacturing plant is going to have a large organizational chart. You won't have too many flat lines as you likely have several different areas that are tied to each other and have to report to each other in order to have success. There will be lines that are vertical showing the departments that are tied and then lines that are horizontal, which show the reporting procedures and overall hierarchy of the company. Think of your organizational chart like a tree as it will have one main area to start and then it moves into several different branches here and there.

As you look at how large your organizational chart is, you will be able to determine if you have enough room to list the people that are actually in these positions. You should at least list the job that is here if you cannot list both the name of the person and the job title.

A great way to clean up the organizational chart is to have boxes around the names of the people or the job title. Here you can clearly see who reports to whom and you also have a clear picture of which department is responsible for things like the ordering of raw goods and so forth. Usually for the upper management individuals you will end up placing their name in this section. As the chart dwindles down you will be able to see that you don't have as many names listed because you do have so many people in the smaller roles like working on the production line.

To create an organizational chart you can look to just about any program. From Microsoft Word to PowerPoint and even Publisher you can create a good organizational chart for your company. Having it saved as a electronic format is a great option so you can get back into it when you need to and alter it as people move jobs or when you need to change out the way in which departments communicate with each other or how they are organized.

An organizational chart is nice to have as it gives you a vision for the company. You can see who you need to talk to in order to have certain tasks accomplished for the company. For the organizational chart to provide you with benefits you need to assign work to different areas of it. Then you need to talk to the various departments and employees to help them understand how they can work together to accomplish the tasks that are at hand.

Some companies will use the chart when they are setting performance standards. You have something tangible to help you measure goals against so you can actually work on making the right type of difference you need to get your employees attention and to show them just what they need to know and do to meet their goals.

Use organizational charts for your staff not only for the needs of using them for your employees but also for the way in which you communicate with your vendors and others. Creating it as a relationship tools gives you a great way to stay in control over the relationships you have.