PLANNING TECHNIQUES
Most of the planning you do as a manager is simply a matter of
thinking systematically and using your common sense. Every
plan contains three key ingredients:
■ Objective – the innovation or improvement to be achieved.
■ Action programme – the specific steps required to achieve
the right objective.
■ Financial impact – the effect of the action on sales, turnover,
costs and, ultimately, profit.
Figure 43.1 is an example of how a manufacturing plan could be
set out.
Bar charts should be used to express plans more graphically
wherever there is more than one activity and care has to be taken
to sequence them correctly. The manufacturing plan illustrated
in Figure 43.1 could be expressed as a Gantt chart (see Figure
43.2).
A more refined method of planning activities in a complex
programme, where many interdependent events have to take
place, is network planning. This requires the recording of the
component parts and their representation in a diagram as a
network of interrelated activities. Events are represented by
circles, activities by arrows, and the time taken by activities by
the length of the arrows. There can also be dotted arrows for
dummy activities between events that have a time rather than an
activity relationship. A critical path can be derived which high-
lights those operations or activities which are essential for the
completion of the project within the allocated timescale. An illus-
tration of part of a basic network is given in Figure 43.3.
There may be occasions when even more sophisticated plan-
ning techniques, using computer models, can be made available
to help the manager, especially when large quantities of informa-
tion have to be processed against a number of fixed assumptions
or parameters, or where alternative assumptions have to be
assessed. In Book Club Associates, for example, the loading
required in the warehouse in terms of machine time and work
hours can be projected two years ahead by feeding parameters
for projected activity levels into the programme. Plans can then
be made to ensure that workers and machine capacity are avail-
able to deal with forecast work levels.
How to Plan 269