Goals or targets that must be achieved by the individual functional areas into which a business is divided (eg Finance, Marketing, Operations and Human Resources) to ensure that the overall corporate objectives are met. They must be consistent with, and supportive of, the overall corporate objectives. For example, a business’s overall corporate objective may be to achieve a 10% increase on profit for the year and it may set the following functional objectives to ensure this corporate objective is achieved: Marketing: To increase sales from £45,000 to £50,000 per month; Human Resources: To reduce total average unauthorised absence from 10 days to 2 days per month; Finance: To eliminate the need for a bank overdraft (and, thus interest payments) by reducing the average number of days it takes customers to pay from 73 to 56 days within the next 3 months; Production: To reduce the number of rejects / defective products from 2.5% to 1.5% over the next 6 months.