ZIFFPAGE TITLEBaseline Goals

Technology and business executives who fail to manage the psychology of their projects do so at their own peril. Elisabeth Nash knew she'd have to coax good people onto a project to overhaul the processes and systems at the mortuary giant. Yet, they might

Baseline Goals:

• Increase sales of packaged funerals from 14% of Service Corp.'s North American transactions in 2002, to more than 16% in 2004.
• Increase gross margin on funeral transactions to more than 20% in 2004, up from 18.9% in 2003.
• Increase gross margin on cemetery business to as much as 17% in 2004, compared to 13.5% in 2003.
• Decrease the ratio of net debt to cash from 6 to 1 in 2003, to as low as 5 to 1 in 2004.