Organization corporate center

Within this organization, corporate center departments make suggestions and prepare decisions, but they have no management responsibility in relation to the operating units. Corporate center costs are carried separately in the P L statement, and not allocated to the businesses. Thus, businesses control their total cost without corporate charges. 

Companies that have bought into the idea of a fairly small corporate center with limited day-to-day control should be careful not to become anorectic, however. With the critical size of a chemical compan/s market capitalization now in excess of USD 10 biUion, many companies have tended to become like conglomerates of related businesses. In order to add value (and to minimize the discount that the market puts on conglomerates), these organizations corporate centers - aside... 

Apart from the four Business Units, Philips DAP has two Corporate Centers, four Centers of Competence (centers where development and production take place) and about 40 National Sales Organizations, which are organized in regions. DAP employs some 10,000 people worldwide. The DAP division markets about 400 different products, selling around 70 million units a year. Some of the appliances they make and sell are very straightforward, while others have been given... 

Furthermore, corporate centers which choose to stay diversified should recognize the substantially different nature of commodity and specialty chemical businesses. They hence need to manage them differently and in doing so bridge the chasm this will almost certainly create within their organizations. 

A market-oriented organization was created, as decentralized as possible, as centralized as necessary . The strategic rationale was driven by the diversity of market segments and fast-changing market conditions, an environment in which innovation and market intelligence were crucial. The new structure separated the lean corporate center, operating businesses, and services to maximize autonomy and entrepreneurship. 

Our own research into best practice in this area does not surface one right answer, and given the vast differences between chemical companies, we would be very surprised if it did. Nevertheless, one organizational model seems to fit the needs of the chemical industry particularly well in our experience, this is an organization with global business divisions (i.e., product-based business units with worldwide control of all critically important business functions) as the main axle, guided by the corporate center and supported by shared services. About three quarters of the global players in chemicals have adopted this structure. 

Redesigning the corporate organization in a way that best unleashes performance at business unit level and captures cross-business synergy, in particular putting in place a lean investor-type corporate center that can unlock these synergies at low cost. 

As described in Section 5.3, business units have to align their organization and skills with the chosen business model and pull all the levers needed for outstanding execution (Figs. 5.12 and 5.13). The corporate center can help to ensure that they remain energized and perform best within the bigger corporation in three... 

The company has always been noted for its commitment to education in a recent "Visions and Values" statement, education has a significant role and is viewed as a priority for the company worldwide. This commitment can also be shown by the organization of BP s new corporate center in London, where educational affairs is a function coordinated by a small team of dedicated individuals responsible only to the COO and CEO and supporting the Managing Directors of the four business streams — BP Exploration and Production, BP Chemicals, BP Oil, and BP Nutrition. 

An industrial organization must decide whether to charge off air pollution control costs as a corporate charge, so that the plant manager does not include them in the accounts or the reverse, so that the plant manager must show a profit for the plant as a cost center, after including costs of air pollution control. 

Further research at the Center for Entreprenenrship and Corporate Growth at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University will focns on refinements to the model, its predictive uses, and its use as a basis for developing Organic Growth Best Practices. 

Edward D. Hess is Adjunct Professor of Organization and Management, Executive Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Corporate Growth, and Executive Director of the Values-Based Leadership Institute at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University. 

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support for the conference provided by the following Arkansas organizations and individuals Arkansas Electric Power Company Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company BEI Electronics, Inc. First Commercial National Bank General Dynamics Corporation John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Administration Medical Center Union National Bank University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Whit Stevens and Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. Support for publication of this book was provided in part by the Citadel Research Foundation, Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Currently, the most important application area for membrane distillation is water desalination technology. Figure 10 shows one of the water desalination processes developed by a Japanese organization, the Water Re-Use Promotion Center, in cooperation with Takenaka Corporation and Organo Corporation (204). The process uses solar energy and can therefore be installed at locations without an electricity supply. Other application areas for membrane distillation reported in the literature are summarized in Table 8. 

Furthermore, owning a PC provides independence from other sub-organizations, e.g. from a corporate computing center. On the other hand, besides limitations in compute power, storage capacity and output devices, there exist more serious shortcomings of PCs in the following areas ... 

Floyd CH, Lewis CH, Patel S, Whittaker M, The automated synthesis of organic compounds—some newcomers have some success, In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Laboratory Automation and Robotics 1996, Zymark Corporation, Zymark Center, Hopkinton MA, pp. 51-76, 1997. 

---