Fractal lines [business structures design]

Medium-sized enterprises generally need business structures that allow flexible and uncomplicated responses to changing market situations. Their management, particularly in companies operating in a narrow market gap, is forced to display more dynamic activities. The demands on their time are characterised by frequent problems, such as failure to deliver in due time, order processing that is difficult to understand, and ever increasing periods for delivery with ever-increasing stocks. The causes for these problems can be found, in most cases, in obscure departmental organisation and workflow structures. Functional enterprise structures developed over the years no longer meet market demands. Structural adaptations and changes are often overdue, but fail because of the sheer complexity of the task. We describe a six-level model-the fractal enterprise-for the design and realisation of vital enterprise structures, which has proved to stand the test in several industrial projects