So, what specific steps should we take to align the organization? Below are several suggestions for aligning your organization for manufacturing excellence. These have been used in one form or another at Beta International to better align their organization. You may not need to apply all these, but they should help start the thinking process for better alignment and improved performance, or they may trigger other ideas that are more suited to your organization. Before you consider these, constantly keep in mind that people will almost always act in their personal interest. It's essential then that corporate interests and personal interests be sufficiently aligned so that both individuals and the corporation will benefit from that alignment and the resulting improved performance.

At the highest level, we might consider the model in Figure 2-1, one used by Beta to align the marketing and sales, manufacturing, and R&D functions. Each functional area has certain goals, e.g., marketing and sales for market share and booking volume, manufacturing for production, unit cost, and on-time delivery, and R&D for research into new products and processes. Each will be held accountable for its function's performance measures, and there might be common goals and measures between any two functional groups, but all will be held accountable for the corporation's superordinate goals, e.g., market share, return on assets, gross profit per unit of product, business volume percentage of new products, and so on. So, for example, if marketing meets its goal for booking...