CHAPTER 1
Great Execution: An Overview

Do you ever feel that your business signs off on a solid plan every month, but it is never actually delivered? Does everyone seem to be running around putting out the latest fire, crashing from one crisis to another, but thinking that each one is an isolated incident that could not have been predicted? Is your team stressed out with trying to keep their heads above water with all of these changes so that they never actually have any time to work on long-term fixes for problems and only ever apply a bandage before moving on to the next fire? Or is everyone looking over everyone else's shoulder to make sure that things are done because they either don't trust them to do things or don't really know who should be doing what?

If you feel any of these symptoms apply to you, then read on.

Most businesses now have some form of a monthly planning process that looks to balance supply and demand over at least the current year. This type of process started life as sales and operations planning (S&OP), but Oliver Wight evolved it into what is now known as Integrated Business Planning. What many businesses don't appreciate is that this type of process is fine for the mid- to long-term future to identify and address the gaps in strategy and business plans, but in the short term you need a complementary suite of processes with more frequent cadence and more granularity of detail to actually make the monthly plan happen. This is called Integrated Tactical Planning.

The value of a good planning environment is not so much about the planning capability, but as Oliver Wight put it more than 40 years ago, it is the ability to "re-predict, re-predict, re-predict" (Wight, 1981). In modern parlance, that means a formal planning environment that has the ability to replan quickly and accurately as circumstances change and engage the right people, at the right level, in the right time horizon, to collaboratively agree to the change in plans.

Having said that, businesses need a good plan to start with, so we are not suggesting this is a replacement for a rock-solid Integrated Business Planning process looking out for the next 2 to 3 years, but what we are suggesting is that change is inevitable, and the Integrated Business Planning process should not be managing those changes in the next 3 months. What companies need is a robust lower-level process, with the purpose of rebalancing plans each week to meet the Integrated Business Planning plan in the next 3 months . and if it can't be done, they need to communicate that fact early.

The key to why Integrated Tactical Planning is crucial to running a business well is summarized in the following three ingredients that explain why some companies make it and others don't:

1. Reducing the time it takes the executive team to manage the business (operational activities) by a factor of five
2. Refocusing the executive team on market-facing activities
3. Realigning everyone else (onto the same page) to drive execution and results

Integrated Tactical Planning in concert with Integrated Business Planning is a fundamental process that provides businesses with the confidence that these objectives will be met.

Introduction

Welcome to the well-hidden world of the Integrated Tactical Planning process. In a sea of advice from consultants and subject matter experts on the monthly business-management framework of Integrated Business Planning, there are very few references as to how the Integrated Business Planning process plans get deployed. (If you are not familiar with the concept of Integrated Business Planning process, Chapter 2 will expand the concept a little further and its relevance to the layers of business planning.) The Integrated Tactical Planning process is the heartbeat or control tower of execution in a business, and the intent of this book is to reorientate your way of thinking about the differences among the layers of planning and the differences between planning and execution.

If you feel like the executive team is continually being sucked into managing immediate and urgent issues, and other senior managers don't seem to be able to break out of focusing on the next few months (at best), and there's very little confidence in predicting the end-of-year position, it is likely you need greater discipline in getting the tactical horizon under control. As one senior executive was heard saying, "It feels like there's a wildfire burning unpredictably, and we just can't get ahead of it to create a fire break. Even if we did get ahead of it, we wouldn't know where to put it!" (See Figure 1.1.)

FIGURE 1.1 Wildfire

If this sounds like your company, it is not hard to get started, and once started, the benefits will come quickly. Excuse the pun, but you just need to create the "burning platform" for the business and get going, and then you need to structure a sustainability plan so it becomes self-perpetuating.

About the Process

This book will give you the basic definitions, concepts, and real-life examples of how Integrated Tactical Planning has been applied in various industries and businesses, and, importantly, give you enough information to help your organization get started. It is, however, not the definitive text on the subject. By the end, though, you will understand enough about the concepts and application to know that taking a cookie-cutter approach will not work. Process design must be aligned with your company structure, its strategy, and its go-to-market approach, and you must recognize that behavior and culture are highly likely to need to change.

Why Integrated Tactical Planning?

Although this is not a new concept, it has not had much airplay over the last couple of decades because it has been overshadowed by a growing understanding and desire to deploy mid- to long-term aggregate planning processes (Integrated Business Planning) in businesses. This monthly management framework has delivered enormous benefits to businesses, but in some circumstances, it has led to a blurring of objectives between a monthly senior management planning process and the weekly middle-management execution of those plans. When we say, "execution of those plans," we usually mean the next 3 months, but we'll cover how to determine the time frame later in the book.

Many Integrated Business Planning processes struggle to focus enough time on the longer term because the shorter-term (tactical) issues keep getting in the way. In the 50 years that Oliver Wight has been helping companies run better businesses, we don't know of any examples of companies that have too many resources to do what needs to get done, and hence, the focus is on having the right level of people in the organization, making the right decisions, on the rights things, at the right time.

The other symptom we often see is a gulf between the monthly medium- to long-range planning process and execution of those plans in the next week or so, with nothing in between. When we started working with a food company recently, they ran a rudimental monthly Integrated Business Planning process, and the only process thereafter was a daily sales and supply schedule check. By putting off considering some of the materials they needed to purchase 12 to 14 weeks out, it left purchasing second-guessing most of their purchases. They ended up with either holding too much raw and packaging materials or running out of critical ingredients. It also meant that there was no way to use the planning system to manage purchases. This expensive piece of planning software just became a transactional system-and is such a waste of resources both human and computer.

To contextualize where Integrated Tactical Planning fits, there are five fundamental levels of planning (see Figure 1.2):

1. Annual strategic and business planning processes-typically a horizon of 5 to 10 years
2. Quarterly check-ins to the strategic themes, key metrics review, and the cost of the go-to-market approach
3. Monthly realignment with the annual business and strategic planning horizons-typically a horizon of a rolling 24 months, but 36 months is becoming more common (the Integrated Business Planning process)

   FIGURE 1.2 Levels of Planning

   Source: Oliver Wight. Copyright Oliver Wight International, Inc. Used with permission.

4. Weekly realignment of the tactical horizon back to the monthly horizon (the Integrated Tactical Planning process)
5. Daily execution and alignment back to the weekly plan

This book will cover primarily the weekly process shown in point 4, but ultimately best-in-class businesses will have one set of plans that cut across each level of planning. This is, however, where confusion and misalignment can occur. One client, who exported perishable items around the world, was quite specific about the break in integration with the comment, "We put a lot of effort into doing our monthly management process and making sure the numbers and plans are aligned out to 36 months, but then immediately after we sign them off, we forget about them until next month, and wonder why we never hit our plans."...