Reference no: EM131031030

An international bottle manufacturer produces glass containers for customers that include condiment producers, breweries, and wineries. The growing demand for plastic containers and a history of higher production costs due to high scrap and return rates drove the business to focus its improvement efforts on cost and customer performance. However, the unique characteristics of the bottle manufacturing process and the way in which the company measured and motivated its workforce’s performance made these improvements difficult to accomplish. Bottle plants are traditionally organized around two primary functions: forming and selecting. Forming is where raw materials are melted in furnaces and mol-ten glass is cut and formed by fast-moving, noisy, and dangerous machines that turn out thousands of bottles each minute. The workforce is primarily older males.In the selecting department, the work is relatively quiet and clean. The majority of workers are female, and the work is focused on spotting and removing bottles that fail to meet height, weight, dimension, centricity, and thickness specifications. The principal performance measure in the forming department is the pack-to-melt ratio, calculated by dividing the total weight of bottles shipped by the total weight of the raw materials used. Individual and team performance goals are typically tied to this measure. The focus is on throughput and getting the highest percentage of produced bottles packed and shipped to customers. In the selecting department, customer satisfaction is the key measure of work performance, and compensation is based on how much product is accepted by the customer. As you can imagine, relations between the two departments were quite strained. To achieve its strategic goals of lower cost and improved customer performance, what could this company do to align the goals of the forming and selecting departments?