Control involves ensuring that performance does not deviate from standards. The control process in business management is where managers establish, measure and improve their business operations and manage cost control. The control process is the system that allows you to configure, measure, compare and modify any business activity, such as production, packaging, delivery and more. Once the plans are established, management must execute a series of steps to ensure that the plans are carried out.
Monitoring can also reveal inadequate standards; in that case, corrective action could involve a change in the original rules rather than a change in performance. Understanding the control process shows whether plans are being fulfilled and, if not, what actions must be taken to achieve them. Through the management control process, a company can precisely determine if plans are going in the right direction and if they are being fully implemented. An example of proactive control is when an engineer tests the brake system of a prototype vehicle before moving on to designing the vehicle for mass production.
If you don't apply a control process, you're not actually managing your business processes. For example, manufacturing equipment would be lost without a control process that allows them to measure and improve their management function. They are the selected points of an entire planning program where performance is measured so that managers can receive signals about how things are going and, therefore, do not have to monitor every step of the execution of the plans. It should be mentioned that, unless managers understand the control process to its conclusion, they are limited to monitoring performance rather than exercising control.
If the standards are not met, the manager must decide if greater control is required or, if perhaps, the standard itself should be changed. For example, controlling the work of the labor relations manager is not easy because it is not easy to develop definite norms. The proper performance of the management control function is critical to the success of an organization. An example of feedback control is when a sales goal is set, the sales team works to achieve it for three months, and at the end of the three-month period, managers review the results and determine if the sales goal has been achieved.
Once the deviation has been analyzed and its cause determined, the manager will need to establish a plan using corrective measures, control of critical points, and other means to resolve the problem. Some of the situations detected in a control process may require the adoption of corrective measures to save the company, while others may simply be performance below the standard that must be corrected to improve processes and resume production as planned.
