Content area
Full text
The steel industry is a recent convert to management strategies such as business process redesign and enterprise networking-strategies long viewed as standard practices in the service industries. However, converts to a new religion are often the most fanatical. Steel industry managers now talk about processes, not products. Supply and value chains are the points of entry to reduce inventories, compress production cycles, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, strengthen relationships with key suppliers, and boost employee morale. All these create the efficiencies that leverage assets, increasing return on capital. The money, after all, is the fuel for continued growth and renewal.
The speed and ease with which management information flows is enabling steel companies to break down old boundaries. Their perspectives of their own supply chains now stretch horizontally outside company walls. The results are durable, seamless, and intimate relationships with suppliers and customers.
Inside steel companies, the abilities and speed that network technology confers requires a work force with greater latitude to act and, therefore, more skills and more understanding of its company's overall direction. In this article, I will explore some of the overall directions and issues facing steel companies, and then provide several specific examples of how network technology is providing greater workforce latitude.