In many large business organizations today, it is common that the financial experts are physically located separately from operational personnel. One effect of this isolation is that the people with financial expertise often lack understanding of important facets of operations. At SC Johnson, financial experts intermingle in teams with production experts and much decision authority is delegated to cross-functional teams. Individuals with responsibilities for cost management, quality, safety, and so on rotate duties to learn about staffing, quality management, production processing, and production scheduling.
Top management takes the view that every employee is essential to the success of the company-and the company has 12,000 employees in 70 countries and has never had a layoff!
a. How could a financial specialist who is charged with designing an open-book management system benefit from serving a rotation in production, quality management, and other functional areas?
b. Discuss how open-book management implementation would be affected by including, on cross-functional teams, a specialist in cost management.