Corporate Leadership in Manufacturing

Planning is a 3-step process involving the development of strategy, tactics and implementation guidelines. The strategic plan formulates what an organization wants to be and provides specific statements of strategic intent that can be passed down to every department in the organization. The tactical plan identifies the critical processes germane to the critical success factors and to the strategic intent. An organization should focus on the processes that drive its critical success factors. One tool that can be utilized in fine-tuning these processes is quality function deployment (QFD). QFD is a systematic process for transforming customer requirements to design and process parameters. Another process-tuning tool is just-in-time - an operating philosophy that strives to eliminate waste. Statistical process control is a common language linking management and workers. It is a way to quantitatively assess the capability of any process. This assessment can be made through a first-run yield audit.