The Work That Belongs at the Center

Scale in the System

As an organization expands across markets, the workforce question shifts from how many people are needed to where decisions and roles actually belong. Some work becomes more effective when it is held centrally, while other work loses quality and speed when moved too far from the people closest to the transaction.

That boundary carries an operating cost. Central teams can become bottlenecks if they absorb work that depends on regional knowledge, while local teams can add duplication if each market rebuilds systems or standards that should sit in one place.

Oscar Lovera, Chief Operating Officer at Xometry, describes that division through the company’s European operations, where scale depends on separating system work from local human context.

Lovera says Xometry centralizes work that benefits directly from network scale, including pricing algorithms, software infrastructure, supplier matching, and core quality standards. In his account, those functions belong at the center because consistency improves operating efficiency.

He keeps business development, key account management, and hands-on engineering support regional. Manufacturing procurement, he says, depends heavily on local trust, language, and cultural understanding, which makes regional proximity important for customer and supplier relationships.

The same distinction shapes headcount and automation decisions. Before adding people, he reviews how much time a team spends on high-value work versus administrative overhead. AI and automation reduce repetitive work such as manual CAD drawing analysis, quoting back-and-forth, and order tracking, which shifts hiring away from volume execution and toward specialised roles where human judgment matters more.

The cost issue sits in assigning work to the wrong layer of the organization. Centrally held work can create drag when it requires proximity, while locally held work can multiply expense when consistency would have carried it more effectively.

Scale changes workforce structure before it changes headcount. The durable gains come from deciding where consistency compounds and where judgment needs to remain close to the work.