Showing posts with label management control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label management control. Show all posts

Monday 6 February 2017

THE CONTROL PROCESS


Control is the process of ensuring that the organisation steadily pursues what it decided it should achieve, and not anything else. So, to control is to ensure that the performance of the institution stays within predefined bounds.

Controlling is only possible where plans prescribing what is to be done exist; and plans may be a waste of resources without any form of control. That is because the purpose of control is focusing performance in the direction of the desired outputs, not just any outcomes.

Control can be applied to all sorts of plans, and examples are those concerning inventory re-order quantity, revenue, profitability, quality, productivity and safety.  
About five major steps are taken in the control process.

1.     Determining Standards. Ordinarily, anything to be regulated requires standards. Standards are performance benchmarks, or grades that indicate acceptable levels of operation, without which the organisation may not be able to achieve its objectives.  

Standards often make use of comparative representations like sales-to- quotation ratio and profit margin; rates like units produced a day and breakdowns per month; and even absolute measures like degrees Celcius or degrees Fahrenheit.

The level of performance picked as standard can depend on many factors. We use three examples from the sales arena:

                                         i.          The amount of experience possessed by the person carrying out the task. For example, new sales people fresh from school are not normally expected to sell as much as older, seasoned ones.

                                  ii.           The time of year. Sweaters and other warm clothes, for instance, do    not sell as much in summer as in winter.

                               iii.       The level of competition, as in a new, growing market generating a lot more business than a crowded, mature one. 
     
Other strong elements affecting the decision to adopt a particular standard are type of industry or product and resources at the disposal of the institution.
For some variables, say, friendliness of customer service, establishing standards can be difficult.

2.     Monitoring. Monitoring simply means keeping an eye on what is happening. Today, it is not always a necessity, especially because of the emergence of high-intelligence, computer-driven technologies which can perform the monitoring task and give alarm signals when something goes wrong. Even then, however, monitoring by humans remains extremely important in some cases. Besides, machines are not infallible.

Some jobs just may not be performed as well by the latest technology as by the manager. For example, cutting-edge technology might be unable to read sadness in a worker.  The human supervisor, on the other hand, can quickly notice and address it before it begins to affect output. Even if no action is immediately taken, step 4 is likely to be quicker and less time-consuming if the manager has some mental recollection of how, in this example, an employee had looked.

And there are problems that have to be spotted and corrected instantaneously, thereby requiring second-by-second monitoring: like those occurring in a boxing or football contest, making it necessary for the manager to shout out instructions all the time.
  
3.     Measuring and comparing. Measuring results and comparing with set standards is done to find out if everything is going well. The actual could turn out to be below or above expectation. There is often an acceptable degree to which actual can exceed standard or fall below.

Caution: just because the standard has been outstripped does not mean celebration. Sometimes, higher is as bad as lower. A business, therefore, cannot produce any more than its storage facilities can hold or the market can readily buy.  That is to say, control is for deficiencies as well as excesses.

4.     Diagnosing problem.  When outputs are in accord with standard, there is normally no action taken (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, some say), even though some might recommend measures to further strengthen the chances of attaining the preferred outcome.

When results are outside of allowable limits, steps are taken to determine what caused the deviation. The problem area is expected to be either the standard itself or the way things are done.

5.     Taking remedial action. Like step 3, this is split into two possibilities. If the problem is wrong standard, a new standard is worked out. If it is wrong work formula, a new formula is devised.

More specifically, the answer usually falls in any one, or combination of, the following categories:

                                                  i.      Changing the manner or style in which things are done.
                                                ii.      Changing the conditions under which things are done.
                                              iii.      Changing the inputs or aids.
                                             iv.      Changing the actor (machine or human), or
                                               v.      Changing the standard.

Do note (Figure XY below) that if it is the standard that has to be reviewed, step 1 serves as step 5 as well. It also is step 1 in subsequent cycles. Step 5 is phase 1 in circulations following the first.



       Figure XY: The five-step control process.


        



                        Rupert Chimfwembe                                                                                          30 January 2017