Controls should lead to corrective action.

The essence of controls is corrective action. Adequate controls should indicate where failures are occurring and those who are responsible. Control is justified only if indicated deviations are corrected through appropriate planning, organizing, staffing and leading.

Critical Control Points and Standards

To ensure that the operations in any firm are going as planned, the manager must select points for special attention and watch them. The points so selected must be critical i.e. points at which the effects of deviations would be enormous or too damaging. The principle of critical point control becomes vital to every organization. This principle says "effective control requires attention to those factors critical to performance as measured against individual plans".

Because of the diverse nature of enterprises there are no specific types of controls available to all managers. Production and services to be measured are enormous, plans and programmes to be followed are innumerable so controls must be tailored to fit individual needs.

The ability to select critical control points is one of the arts of management so managers must deal with such questions as:

    (a)    What will best reflect the goals of my department?
    (b)    What will best show me when these goals are not being met?
    (c)    What will best measure critical deviations?
    (d)    What will inform me as to who is responsible for any failure?
    (e)    What standards will cost the least?
    (f)    For what standards is information economically available?