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Bausch & Lomb Essay

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Harvard Case Study: Bausch & Lomb: Regional Organization
Case Overview

The Daniel Gill, the chairman and CEO faces the possibility of changing the organizational structure of Europe, Asia/Pacific, and the Western Hemisphere. The current organization includes an International Division which oversees production and marketing for countries outside the United States. The goal of changing the organizational structure of these three regions is to increase sales growth internationally and decentralize responsibility away from headquarters to field operations.
Case Synopsis Company Background: The company was originally started in 1853 by John Bausch in Rochester, New York. The small store excelled because Bausch discovered …show more content…

The two divisions were often on different pages and experienced communication challenges. This created several pricing difficulties making it even harder to globally market the products. To further the problem, the ID felt as though their R&D received less than sufficient manufacturing resources, which limited the ability to forecast the global market. Difficulties in communication slowed R&D, decision making, and required a major change in the organizational structure. Gill decided to increase the capabilities of the ID and give specific regions more power in the decision making process. Regionalization: New structures were formed in order to approach the ID problems. The organizational reconstruction focused on speed of results, process to be driven by B&L executives, and input from as many B&L employees as possible. A significant amount of time and money was dedicated to creating a task force that was goal was to evaluate organizational structure. They concluded that it was necessary for a fine-tuning of the current organization structure, a regional structure, a product-region matrix, and a global product structure. Eventually the idea regionalization was adopted by the Advisory Committee. The ID was to be dissolved and replaced by headquarters in Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Western Hemisphere. Jobs in the ID were reallocated to different divisions and new products were developed according to align with the region's needs.

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