Problèmes de planification, systèmes de gestion et organisation interne de la firme

Planning, information management and internai structure of the firm. The aim of the authors is to contribute to the design of methods helping business management to choose the organisation (definition of frontiers for the firm, division and delegation of responsibility ) and the means of co-ordination, supervision, and motivation of managers and employees. To this end, they present observations from an example of structural change in an agro-food company, in order to continue and extend a recent work examining the concept of planning and its role in the company efficiency. In particular, they analyse the determinants of the choice of an alternative to a centralised functional organisation (with buying, production and sales departments ), using as a starting point the successive reorganisation attempts of the company following the deregulation of its environment. The observations underpinning this analysis are the result of a research and intervention project. This project involved collaboration with senior management to examine both conditions for success of any reorganisation designed to respond to the new variety and reactivity requirements due to the market as well as possible differentiation of the contractual practices with the farmers, the suppliers of raw materials. The analysis of the solution finally adopted by the company, after a trial and error process, and other experiments elsewhere, suggests the hypothesis, which appears to be useful to explain the behaviour of managers involved in this succession of reorganisations. This work confirms the value of research carried to identify practical solutions to some problems of organisation, previously explored in other cases. This approach emphasises the re-working of concrete systems for developing and following plans. The main applied concept arising from this case is as follows. The defects in co-ordination of functional organisation caused by the pressure of competition, combined with a greater variability of the upstream and downstream markets (stock shortages causing loss of market, or inversely cash flow problems due to overspending on resources leading to precipitate and undervalued selling of intermediate products ) can lead to diagnosis of the cause of the dysfunction along the wrong lines : what would be seen as professional incompetence indicated by incapacity to make reliable previsions, establish budgets and ! or react to events will be spontaneously registered as faulty control. The subsequent desire to improve this control leads to fragmentation into divisions due to real difficulties of instrumentation for this control in the original organisation or to aggravate the resulting conflicts, or to focuse on indicators which are unable to cover technical interdependence. Inversely, examination of the possibility of reforming the basis of planning and monitoring operations, improves the chance of identifying alternative forms of organisation which retain some of the advantages of functional centralisation (economies of scale for particular activities).La simple identification du problème de planification en avenir radicalement incertain qu'affrontent les responsables opérationnels d'une firme est déjà un facteur clé d'amélioration de la performance. C'est ce qu'ont montré de nombreuses recherches en gestion préoccupées par la conception des systèmes de pilotage permettant de faciliter la prise en charge collective de ce problème. Quand la rénovation des systèmes paraît insuffisante ou trop coûteuse, le changement de structure organisationnelle permet de poser différemment ce problème en redistribuant les zones d'autonomie et les interfaces critiques. Cet article fournit un cadre explicatif des changements successifs d'organisation observés dans une firme agro-alimentaire dans un contexte de dérégulation de ses marchés. Il met en évidence ce problème structurant de la planification partagée des flux et le type de réponse organisationnelle finalement trouvé.Soler Louis-Georges, Tanguy Hervé, Valceschini Egizio. Problèmes de planification, systèmes de gestion et organisation interne de la firme. In: Cahiers d'Economie et sociologie rurales, N°37, 4e trimestre 1995. innovations. pp. 201-225