Auditing Manufacturing Systems 

— Reducing the order quantity to the plant.

— Moving to a time-phased replenishment planning system with customer visibility versus only a reorder point system with large lot sizes.

Sales/Marketing effectiveness.

— Improving demand forecasting.

— Revising roles and responsibilities, and prioritiz­ing value-adding activities.

— Removing incentives in the sales compensation system that inject bias into the forecast and de­mand planning.

— Removing complexity from the forecasting sys­tem.

— Assigning accountability and responsibility for tracking the sales forecast versus actual customer demand and explaining all out-of-tolerance condi­tions.

— Having Sales/Marketing review all demands monthly and determining a root cause for all out-of-tolerance conditions.

— Regularly visiting the manufacturing plants and developing a better understanding of the manu­facturing process.

— Replacing the forecasting system with customer demand information.

— Better prioritization of selling activities and work­ing closer with the customer to determine cus­tomer expectations.

— Aligning sales with market focus, business and manufacturing strategy.

— Reducing paperwork.

— Better explanation of new products to the cus­tomer.

— Better focus on key market influences.

— Increasing net selling time by x%.

— Increasing sales by x% over the current budget.

— Having more timely information on the customer, market and competition.

— Participating in a monthly Partnership meeting with distribution, planning and manufacturing.

Product development.

— Ensuring the main objective is to get to the "voice of the customer" and translate that information into product definition.

— Reducing the time and cost to bring new products to the market by 50%.

— Improving concurrent development of new prod­ucts.

— Using the Quality Function Deployment concepts and tools.

— A new product development process that is simple and understood.

— New product development process that has mile­stones defined. They are used to gatekeep and ensure all required deliverables are on time.

— Reducing the time to generate bills of material and product documentation.

— Improving on time of new product deliverables used internally.

— Implementing an engineering capacity planning system.

— Improving engineering productivity by 30%.

— Increasing interaction with the business teams.

— Improving the quality of the documentation uti­lized by the users.

— Ensuring new products are driven by the needs of the marketplace and not by technical wizardry.