Feedforward Control

• The time lag in the management control process shows that controls must be directed toward the future if it is to be effective. It illustrates the problem of only using feedback from the output of a system and measuring this output as a means of control. It shows the efficiency of historical data, such as those received from accounting reports. One of the difficulties with such historical data is that they tell business managers in November that they lost money in October (or even September) because of something that was food in July. At this late time, such information is only a distressingly interesting historical fact.
• What managers need for effective control is a system that will tell them, in time to take corrective action, that certain problems will occur if they do not do something now. Feedback from the output of a system is not good enough for control. It is little more than a postmortem, and no one has found a way to change the past.
• Future-directed control is largely disregarded in practice, mainly because managers have been so dependent for purposes of control on accounting and statistical data. To be sure, in the absence of any means of looking forward, reference to history-on the questionable assumption that is past is prologue-is admittedly better than no reference at all.
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Feedforward in Human Systems
• There are many examples of feedforward control in human systems. A motorist, for example, who wishes to maintain a constant speed in going up a hill would not usually wait for the speedometer to signal a drop in speed before depressing the accelerator. Instead, knowing that the hill represents a disturbing variable in the system, the driver would probably correct for this by pressing the accelerator before speed falls. Likewise, a hunter will always aim ahead of a duck's flight to correct for the time lag between a shot and a hoped-for hit.
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Requirements for Feedforward Control
• The requirements for a workable feedforward control system may be summarized as follows:
● Make a through and careful analysis of the planning and control system, and identify the more important input variables.
● Develop a model of the system.
● Take care to keep the model up to date; in other words, the model should be reviewed regularly to see whether the input variables identified and their interrelationships continue to represent realities.
● Collect data on input variables regularly, and put them into the system.
● Regular asses variations of actual input data from planned-for inputs, and evaluate the impact on the expected end result.
● Take action. Like any other technique of planning and control, all that the system can do is indicate problems; people must obviously take action to solve them.
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Fundamentals of Management : Controlling [BBA 2305]