Info from the cash registers goes to HQ within an hour of sale, which supplies not only re-order/inventory info, but which also provides immense amounts of data about consumer preferences. Even my beloved, who (as they say in Bentonville) makes a living criticizing Wal-Mart, is highly impressed. Doug
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This is a combination of just-in-time inventory, and automated accounting, merged in an giant database with a whole subsystem of interfaces (order entry, query, report, inventory update, accounts receivable, blah, blah, etc). Dwayne, Ravi, Joanna can explain how all that works.
With such a highly rationalized retail system, you can actually dissolve a great deal of the pragmatic necessity for top-down managerial hierarchies.
You can then re-align human relations into slightly overlapping spheres of activity (distributed horizontally) and get rid of most of the hierarchy that way. This follows more or less loosely from an object oriented programming and distributed network model.
However there are trade-offs. For one, most of the employees have to be relatively smart, responsible, and diligent. Fuck offs, slackers, and petty criminals would have a field day, so that's were you need the co-op model. After all the malcontents are making more work for their comrades--who therefore need to be culled from the herd.
Most decision making is embedded within the distributed system, based on pragmatic need. After all whether you need twenty pallets or fifty pallets of diapers is really a decision that belongs in the warehouse level, since those people know the product flow rate.
I think you can work up non-hierarchical or limited hierarchical plans for just about any industry, including steel.
As for the council model, I can easily see that adapted to the above through representatives of the various components of an industry, who meet to iron out the broad outlines of how things are done, without a lot command oriented decision making of the CEO style. After all the CEO is presented with various well worked out alternatives and just picks and chooses from his/her upper level managers. What's that all about?
And on the other side. Anybody who has dealt with computerized industries realizes very quickly how much inefficiency is built-in for the specific purpose of imposing the capital pig heir archy on systems that have little or no need for it. Most of the time, computers are used to isolate, control, limit, and channel work, rather than facilitate the job at hand---all for the grand purpose of keeping the capitalist pig hegemony in place.
As the sheriff said in Night of the Living Dead, ``Kill the brain, kill the ghoul.''
So, I am saying that we certainly can re-align the logistics to rid ourselves of vast amounts of needless heirarchy...
CG