The purpose of office work is to render efficient’ secretarial and clerical service’ to functional departments-production, purchase, sales etc. In a large organization, various functional departments may have sectional offices providing only the required clerical services to the corresponding departments.
The services provided by each sectional office may be different. This necessitates complete decentralization of office work “However, this raises an important problem.
That is, in-charges of functional departments, who are specialists in the field of their respective functions, cannot be expected to be specialist in the field of office management, say for example, correspondence, filing, data-processing etc.
There are certain office services which are performed by all the offices which can be grouped together and centralised at one place known as ‘central’ or ‘general’ office. Such services, which can be centralized is as follows: (a few)
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1. Typing and filing
2. Mailing
3. Computing
4. Control of forms
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5. Correspondence
6. Collection of data
7. Maintenance and repairs
8. Duplicating services
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9. Employment and training
10. Reception of visitors etc.
The above mentioned general services are required by all the functional departments directly or indirectly. If such general services are carried out efficiently, they can make a considerable contribution towards the efficiency of office management .But if such general services are ill-planned, the efficiency of other department will be adversely affected.
It is important to note that all these services of different departments are inter-related and their efficiency is interdependent. If it is so, the management has to consider whether these services should be centralized or not-Centralization and Decentralization.