Begin with the end in mind: plan from your goals to the work that reaches them
Most improvement planning starts from a list of problems. Leadership conversations usually start somewhere else: with a few goals for the business, and the numbers that will say whether they were met. As of this weekend, the Value Platform starts there too. A new Plan section, first in the menu, takes a company from its strategic goals down to the work that reaches them, and then back up again.
Plan from your goals
It runs in seven steps, and each one saves as you go, so a plan can be built over several sittings.
Direction. Choose up to three strategic goals, the goals beneath them, and the KPIs that will measure success. Each goal shows how many use cases it reaches, so you can watch the library narrow as you choose. Each KPI shows what a 1% move in it is worth a year at a plant like yours, and the use cases that deliver most of its improvement. The KPIs are what focus the plan: they decide which use cases are in scope.
Where you are today. For each KPI, the measurement check asks whether you capture it, how often, whether anyone acts on it, and where it stands now. A KPI nobody captures is a measurement gap, and it is worth knowing that before you set a target on it.
Where you want to be. Targets are stated the way a plant states them: from today's value to where it should be, and by when.
The path. This is the step we are proudest of. The platform ranks the whole library against your targets: one sequence of solutions and enablers, paced into years by how much change your organization can absorb, and the year each KPI reaches its target, or how far it gets if the library as it stands cannot get there. A step earns its place by how much of each target's remaining gap it closes for the change effort it takes, and a step that would lose money is never included.
It also weighs when the benefit lands. A three-year installation that pays off at the end of a three-year plan has to close noticeably more of the gap than a one-year process change to come first. On a test plan of our own, priced as a $1 billion medical device plant and aimed at downtime, mean time between failures and first-pass yield, asset performance management still came first, because it closes so much of both the downtime and reliability gaps, and it starts in year one so that it lands inside the plan. Connected worker and OEE monitoring start the same year. By the end of year three, the path closes about four-fifths of the downtime gap.
If a step would make one of your KPIs worse, the path shows that move in red rather than hiding it.
What if. Try a different pace, a different plan length, or leave a KPI out, and the path re-runs without saving anything. When you like what you see, the page shows where each change is kept for good: your change capacity on the Assumptions page, and the plan's dates and KPIs on the plan itself.
Back to the goals. The last step shows the goals you started with, with how far the path takes each KPI under them, year by year. A goal counts its targets reached. We never add KPIs together, because a point of OEE and a safety incident are not the same unit. Each KPI also names the steps that carry it, so you can trace a strategic goal down to the work.
Then it turns each year of the plan into a draft initiative carrying that year's solutions, enablers and use cases. From there they take the same road as initiatives from Priorities: price each one against your baseline, save it as a scenario, and gather the scenarios into an improvement program.
Any plant or division can make its own plan. Until it does, it follows the nearest plan above it. Company admins build the plan, and everyone in the company sees the active one.
Smaller improvements
Choose what goes into a list. The Gaps tab no longer turns every group into its own list in one click. Tick whole groups or individual use cases, name the list, and generate exactly what you picked. "Merge lists" on the Lists page combines lists into a new one, with duplicates removed, and leaves the originals as they are.
Process changes count as work underway. Committed work can now name the process and organizational changes it makes, such as SPC, TPM or daily management routines, not only the solutions it installs. The model stops recommending those changes and stops counting value they already deliver.
Priorities checks the plan against your gaps. The use-case table on Priorities now lists the use cases your assessment flagged as gaps, most addressed first, with how much of what each needs the plan puts in place. It used to list nearly the whole catalog.
Corrections
Priorities' KPI mode follows the KPI. Asked to improve a KPI, Priorities used to open with the same inexpensive governance and finance steps whatever the KPI, because its ranking mixed dollars into a KPI percentage. It now ranks by how much a step moves the KPI you chose. Ask for mean time between failures and it opens with asset performance management, then maintenance management; ask for cost of quality and it opens with a quality management system.
Funding is not counted as the change. Enablers that pay for a change, such as capital investment in technology, no longer take a share of the credit for the solutions they fund.
Dates are in your time zone. Dates across all three sites were formatted on servers that run on UTC, so for anyone in the Americas an evening date read as the next day. Every date you read now uses your own time zone, including the "generated on" date of PDF reports.
Saved improvement programs were recalculated tonight with these corrections and last week's catalog fixes, so their figures have moved, mostly down.
Where to start
If you lead improvement at a plant, open Plan, choose the strategic goals your leadership already talks about, and pick the three or four KPIs that would tell you they were met. Set a target on one you capture today and look at the path. If the first year surprises you, try the what-if at the pace you think your team can really absorb.
ExampleCo is a fictional manufacturer we built to demonstrate the method. Its financial model and every calculation shown are real; the company, its people and their answers are not. The test plan above was priced on an industry-typical model of a $1 billion medical device plant.