Abstract

The strategic planning process can take many paths. It may take months of preparatory analysis or simply use the collective knowledge of the management team. Either method requires the business to make decisions about its future course. In this article, we’ll show you how to use strategic filters as a way to examine your data and make the best decisions. Then, we will focus these decisions on a few Extremely Important Objectives (MCI) that will be funded and completed.

Strategic planning: strategic filters and tremendously important goals

• Motive Power Filter: The Competitive Advantage You Can Demonstrate
• Pop-up trend filter
• Clients filter
• Tremendously important goals
• Strategy map

Driving force filter

The driving force is the company’s key differentiator or competitive advantage. The most important element of the driving force is proof. If you want your employees and customers to believe you, you need to find the facts to back up your claim.

Here is a list of things that are NOT acceptable examples of driving force:

• Knowledgeable employees
• Customer service
• Quality
• Confidence
• Sensitivity
• Reputation
• Innovation
• Etc.

The reason these are not good examples is that any business can claim them and they all say so. If everyone says it, no one will believe it.

Here are some examples of driving forces that the market may believe are real differentiators:

• Innovation / Experience: We invented the surgical adhesive to replace sutures. The use of surgical adhesive reduces surgical time between 20 and 90% with a lower risk of infection.
• Speed: We will produce any custom product in 2 weeks or less compared to our competitors who are 6 weeks or more.
• Rugged – We produce the toughest portable power generation equipment for military use. Our mean time between failures is over 10,000 hours.
• Customer Service / Training – Last year we trained 1,580 customer mechanics in service / repair techniques and have two mechanics dedicated to helping customer mechanics over the phone.
• Product Leadership – We are the only consulting firm in the Midwest with experience applying quantitative process improvement tools to streamline sales and marketing; reducing costs and increasing sales.

Once you know and agree with the Driving Force of your company, you can use it to understand:

• What you did to be the best
• The core competencies that support your driving force
• How do you stay the best

Pop-up trend filter

Emerging trends are external forces that you cannot control that can affect your business. These may include:

• Economic / monetary trends
• Political / regulatory trends
• Social / demographic trends
• Market conditions
• Customer attributes / habits
• Competitor profiles / mix
• Evolution of technology
• Manufacturing capabilities
• Product design / content
• Sales and marketing methods
• Distribution methods / systems
• Resources: natural / human / financial

We want these to be a strategic filter because they may require you to change your business model beyond internal competencies and customer requirements. They will have an impact on how:

• Sell
• To distribute
• purchase
• Procurement plan
• Develop new products and services.

We have lived through a time of great external upheaval. Books and newspapers are a great example. Amazon changed book buying by making almost all published books available, whether new through its warehouses or used through used book partners. Instead of buying just what’s in the bookstore, you can buy whatever you want, get new book recommendations based on what you’ve bought before, and read other consumers’ reviews before you buy.

Then Amazon changed again by offering the Kindle e-reader linked to its online bookstore. Now you can have thousands of books 1 minute after your purchase delivered wirelessly over mobile networks. Newspapers and magazines are delivered to your Kindle every night at 3 a.m. M. No ink, no printing, no delay or lack of delivery service, no hassle when traveling. Instead, you get perfect service.

Now we have the Apple iPad, which promises to embed graphics and videos in books, magazines, and newspapers. This will incorporate the electronic delivery features of the Kindle and make the reading experience completely different.

Printers and publishers needed to see these trends coming to survive and prosper. These developments can close large companies and turn others into clear winners.

Other notable trends are the environment / cleantech, interest / currency rates, and global markets / supply chains.

Clients filter

Understanding your customers completes the filter puzzle and will allow you to make the best decisions in your strategic plan. You spend a lot of time understanding who your best customers are. We recommend a quantitative approach of choosing the key measurable characteristics that are important to your organization and then using Pareto Analysis to rank your customers from best to worst based on these measures.

Once you know who your best customers are, you can determine the characteristics they share. When communicating through the sales force or directly with these customers, you should ask two critical questions:

• Why do they buy from you?
• What pain do they have?

At the end of the customer filter session, you will know:

• Who is your best customer
• The characteristics of the best (what differentiates them from the others)
• Why do customers buy from you
• What pain clients have that you can resolve (with special emphasis on the best clients

Tremendously Important Goals (MCI)

With all the preparatory work completed, you can now create your strategic plan. The best companies always focus on achieving some tremendously important goals. Everyone in your organization is working on the important things every day. Serving customers, delivering products, training employees, shopping, etc. They are all important and must happen every day, week and month. Strategic planning looks to a longer time horizon. Therefore, we must go beyond what is important and focus on a few (3 or less) tremendously important Goals that will take longer but will generate revolutionary results for your organization.

This approach gives the plan a sense of reality. Many organizations try to do too much and end up not doing most of it or doing average work. You want to be cool!

These MCIs can include:

• Acquisitions or divestments
• Main capital expenditures
• Product development
• Geographic expansions
• Completely new companies or brands
• Marketing campaings
• Globalize the supply chain
• Internal process improvement efforts (Lean Six Sigma)
• Implementation of new information technology systems
• And endless other ideas

Strategy map

The last step is to align the organization with the Extremely Important Goals. A strategy map is a simple tool to visually show how each department will support each MCI.

To see an example of a strategy map, go to http://supplyvelocity.com/whitepapers.asp.

The example you’ll see is a medical technology company whose hugely important goals were to dramatically accelerate new product development. The map shows how Marketing, Research, Development / Engineering and Manufacturing support this strategy.