Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/414972
30 FEDA News & Views continued on page 40 Preparing for 2015 continued one, get one! After all, the majority of the "price wars" that occur in this industry are because the vast majority of its participants have not sat down and tried to determine or craft a customer value proposition. If you undertook this simple exercise, and then leveraged it, can you envision the positive impact it would have on your organization? The next logical step in the design and implementation of a good plan is the establishment of a set of operating metrics or performance metrics. Traditionally, the vast majority of corporate America has a lot of "standard" financial metrics in place (GP, ROI, inventory turns, sales/ employee, etc.), but other classifications of metrics are required as well. For example, performance metrics should be established for customers as well as employees. Why? There is a direct co-relationship between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and the growth and profitability of an organization. If you develop good metrics to measure employee and customer satisfaction, along with policies and procedures to constantly improve your organization's performance in these two key areas, then you significantly increase your chance to attain your desired growth and profitability levels. Unfortunately, very few companies do not pay much attention to anything other than their financials. One last point on metrics, do not establish more than 12 metrics to track on a regular basis and evenly split them among financials, employees, and customers to ensure consistent development. Now that you have a long-term vision, how are you going to get there? The next stage in the process is to identify those "key business priorities" that the company needs to execute in order to reach the vision. If your company is like the many I work with, everyone has his/ her own ideas of what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how it will get done. The key is to get these ideas out in the open so everyone can see them. Next, referring back to your vision statement, narrow your list of ideas down to a maximum of seven priorities. The seven that are chosen should be the ones that will have the greatest impact on the organization within an acceptable period of time. And again, all seven should be directly related to the achievement of the organization's vision. Note: Before you finalize your "seven," it's imperative that you refer back to your internal analysis to make sure that what you're trying to accomplish can be matched with the resources that are available to you. Once the "seven" have been agreed upon by the planning team, it's time to start implementation—the most