The question
The company needed to turn its transport and distribution function into a specialized subsidiary. The new company would operate at once in a regulated market, where it was the only player, and in an open-access market, serving third parties. Leadership needed to know what that company should look like.
What everyone assumed
The temptation in these cases is to treat the change as a reorganization, take the existing area and give it a new org chart and its own name. That changes the form but not the function. A company that will serve third parties needs a different business model, not just a different structure.
How we solved it
We visited comparable companies in other countries to understand what drives the profitability, reliability and efficiency of this kind of operator. With that we designed the new company's business model and operations, and estimated its revenues and costs.
Only then did we turn to the organization, with structure down to supervisor level, lines of command, processes, service agreements with corporate and a scorecard to measure it.
The decision
Leadership adopted a business model built to compete in both markets, with its organization, processes and strategic plan, and the infrastructure investment that model required.
What applies to other companies
A new organization starts with the business model, not the org chart. If the structure is designed first, it ends up copying the logic of what was there before.
The right question is not who reports to whom, but how the new company will make money and what it needs to do so.