Assignment 2 English for business

ASSIGNMENT 2

Hubert Delisle

ADM 232

AU Student ID : 3256834

The ‘’ Société des Alcools du Québec’’

(SAQ)

July 17th

[pic 1]

The SAQ

‘‘The Société des alcools du Québec’’ (SAQ) is a government corporation whose goal is to sell alcoholic beverages such as Wine, strong alcool, drinks, etc. Their mission is to provide a larger service in Quebec by offering a big range of quality products. The ‘’SAQ’’ uses the customer departmentalization for its organizational structure. Customer departmentalization separates work and workers depending on the kind of customers. The ’’SAQ’’ has organized the company into four main departments: V.P. of customer products, V.P. of small business, such as restoration, V.P of major accounts and V.P. of government organization. Every department has their specific tasks: V.P. of customer products and V.P. of small business have to work on managing products and sales and marketing, and V.P. of government organization and V.P major accounts have to work on sales and marketing, importation of new products and promoting products. However, it is difficult to have a good coordination between different departments. The primary advantage of customer departmentalization is that it focuses the organization on customer needs rather than on products or business functions. The primary disadvantage of customer departmentalization is that, like product departmentalization, it leads to duplication of resources. It can also be difficult to achieve coordination across different customer departments.

In each ‘’SAQ’’ store, there is a manager who gives command and takes decision to achieve organizational objectives. Each worker knows whom they have to report to. This kind of chain of command prevent confusion among the company store. Sometimes, the manager of the specific store gives some of his or her authority to a subordinate that could help him or her with the several tasks. The fact that the manager trusts his or her subordinates is good for the company. The manager can complete other tasks while his subordinates is doing something that is originally for the manager. One of the best things in this company is the decentralization; a lot of workers, even at the lower level of the organization, have a significant amount of authority. Every employee can make a small decision that will help the business. This quality of the company leads to a better customer satisfaction.

First, for an employee that works in the company, the job is diversify. Even if you are the cashier or you are the wine taster, workers have to learn every product in the store. This fact makes this specialized job, a multi tasks job. Increasing the number of different tasks for one particular job is called job enlargement. Being a cashier at the ‘’SAQ’’ store involves many things. One part of this job is to answer to several questions from the customers. Another part of this is to advise various products depending on what the customer likes the most. Job rotation is also used at ‘’SAQ’’ to diversify the tasks performed by a worker. Jobs in the ‘’SAQ’’ bring motivation because jobs are themselves rewarding. Workers gain experience by having more knowledge on the products. The purpose is to share this knowledge to customers. However, workers don’t often have knowledge of results; they don’t know how well they are performing their jobs. They also don’t experience responsibility for work outcomes. On the five core job characteristics, three are well used in the company: skill variety, task identity, and task significance.

...