In 1963, Amancio Ortega opened for business enterprise manufacturing ladies' gowns in a small workshop in A Coruna, since then its progress has been remarkable.
Today, Inditex (Industria de Diseno Textil, SA) has become an international fashion retail composed of six business units: Zara, Pull ; Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius and Oysho. Its organizational structure consists of several departments, corporate headquarters, the six business units mentioned above and a number of areas of support or functions shared by all business units.Corporate departments take on functions of a strategic nature or because of the convenience to take advantage of certain economies of scale. These include strategic management, legal and tax advice, financial policy, human resources or corporate communications. The chains of the group or business units have separate management teams and headquarters of Inditex, different activities (major) and autonomy in managing the business.
Finally, among the areas of support or functions shared by all business units, we must stress the real estate department, which is responsible of the location and negotiation of the most suitable for the location of outlets or department Logistics, which handles the receipt, storage and distribution to stores garments produced. Figure 1 shows the flowchart of the Inditex group described above. This organizational structure has succeeded in developing a chain of design and manufacture flexible and efficient.It is capable of bringing new products to the market every week and the process from the design of a new product to be sold only ranges between twenty and thirty days. In addition, the support areas (department of real estate, logistics, etc.
) avoid duplication and waste of resources, eliminating, or at least attenuating, one of the drawbacks typical of divisional structures. It can be concluded that the group Inditex has managed to understand the behavior of demand in their sector and apply it to business decision making supported by an appropriate organizational structure to carry it out. ConclusionsNext, use the design parameters devised by Mintzberg (1979, 1983, 1989) to examine the structural changes that have occurred in companies over recent decades. The first one, the design of jobs, establishing a new distribution of tasks and responsibilities, because organizations had been using mostly classic motor skills (doing) of individuals and learning organizations use their cognitive skills (to know) (Argyris, 1964). The work now appears divided into strictly defined tasks (low horizontal specialization) and the operator moves from run to run it and control it (low vertical specialization) (Gerstein, 1988; Albach, 1997; Gairin, 1997) .Also decreases the formalization of behavior (workers can make suggestions), increases the demand for new skills (hence the great importance accorded to training) (Gerstein, 1988; i Amat Salas, 1989) and induces indoctrination to share knowledge.
As regards the design of the superstructure, a learning organization will reduce the number of hierarchical levels and, due to the introduction into new technologies of information and the need for smaller companies, dynamic and innovative, also decrease the total number of people required to carry out organizational functions (Gerstein, 1988; Navas, 1994, Cabrera and Rincon, 2001).Continuing now with the design models lateral links, a learning organization planning mechanisms occur via mutual adjustment - communication informally, through networks of horizontal coordination-committees or working groups and project-(Gairin, 1997; Medina Garrido, 2000) or by e-mail communications, video conferencing or access to common databases-( Ubeda and Sabater, 2000), allowing all members to exercise dela company a certain self-control over their work (Gerstein, 1988; Albach, 1997) and promoting teamwork, because business processes are becoming more complex and a single individual , deformed independent-you can not address the (Gerstein, 1988). Finally, the design of decision-making system provides greater responsibilities for workers Deuna learning organization, due to increased vertical and horizontal decentralization (Gerstein, 1988; Gairin, 1997).
