Visualize & Optimize Company Structures with Graphs

Visualizing relationships and resources for organizational optimization.

It's not just the big players like General Electric or PETRONAS who have complicated structures. Even relatively small organizations can have complex and interconnected relationships between divisions, business units, subsidiaries, and joint ventures with other companies.

Co-option arrangements, such as joint ventures between competing automobile manufacturers, are also becoming increasingly common. These arrangements allow companies to share risks and costs associated with large-scale projects while also accessing new markets and technologies.

Overall, the growing complexity of intra- and inter-company relationships highlights the importance of effective organizational structures and collaborative partnerships in today's business environment.

Perhaps the most common reason to visualize a company structure is to determine ownership. (Also known as “beneficial ownership,” – i.e., who ultimately benefits from the financial assets produced by the firm.) While complex ownership structures may be purposefully designed to enable fraud or tax evasion (see below), they are more often an entirely innocent and legal result of a company’s, growth and expansion, especially involving mergers and acquisitions.

Transparently identifying and illustrating ownership and the flow of assets is imperative for numerous organizational activities, from cost allocation to regulatory compliance and M&A due diligence.

2016’s “Panama Papers” are the most well-known cache of leaked documents about off-shore accounts. (Others are the “Paradise Papers” in 2017 and the “Pandora Papers” in 2021.) Consisting of some 2.6 terabytes of data, the papers revealed holding companies, shell corporations, and offshore entities used for fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and evading international sanctions.

Diagramming and visualization was indispensable in revealing relationships and weaving coherent narratives out the hoard of some 11.5 million documents, allowing prosecutors to bring 100s of cases and recover over $1.2 billion in fines and back taxes. (See also this blog post by yWork’s CTO Sebastian.)

The org chart is the most familiar and widespread diagram of a company structure. Commonly used to illustrate roles, responsibilities, and lines of reporting, the org chart might also illustrate governance structures (e.g. for a board of directors) or an organization’s relationship with clients, partners, and prospects.

yFiles seamlessly supports all types of personnel org charts, such as hierarchical, matrix, horizontal, networked, and team-based. In the new era of hybrid and remote work, dynamic org charts could for example indicate which staff are onsite a given time or use geo-location data to determine who can be quickly deployed to a crisis location.