How to Make Strategic Vision Clear to Everyone with Digital Manufacturing Technology

In theory, your organization’s strategic vision should drive everything everyone does every day. But reality is often a different story. It can be easy for people, even leaders, to lose sight of the big picture when they get caught up in the day to day. And, even if people have a grasp of the company’s overall strategic plan, they might not understand how their role specifically relates to it. Using digital manufacturing technology to automate strategy deployment can resolve these challenges and unite everyone around common goals to move your company in the right direction.

Put Your Strategic Vision at Everyone’s Fingertips

A strategic plan that is documented on paper and passed around via email or in meetings may do wonders to engage and align your leadership team in the moment. But if it’s not kept up to date or front of mind, it can be easy for such a document to get lost in the shuffle. And, if the strategic vision is not connected to specific initiatives, people, key performance indicators (KPIs), projects, and deadlines, then people at the lower levels of your organization will have a hard time relating to it or knowing exactly what they need to do.

In fact, many companies experience a major disconnect between people and strategy: Only 17% of mid-sized firms and 6% of larger organizations strongly agree that people at all levels of the organization can articulate how their work relates to organizational strategy, according to research by the National Center for the Middle Market and Dr. Peter Ward, a professor of operational management at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.

Clearly, companies have some work to do when it comes to giving their operations people a clear view, and getting them on board with, the bigger picture. Leveraging digital manufacturing technology, specialized in strategy deployment roll out, elevates visibility for the team so everyone is focused on big picture goals.

Automation Keeps Strategy Front of Mind

Using digital manufacturing technology to automate the process of deploying your strategic plan throughout all levels of your organization can help make that strategic vision much more accessible and relevant to the people who are executing against it every day. When everyone is connected to the company’s ultimate goals, and they can clearly see how their work contributes, they’ll be more likely to do their work in a way that benefits the organization. Further, everyone will feel aligned around common goals, and this can have a dramatic effect on morale, teamwork, and productivity.

Research bears this idea out. According to the Center, when companies find ways to interpret the organization’s strategy down to the lowest level, they will be in a much better position to make and sustain long-term operational improvements.

How Does Strategy Automation Work?

As part of a formalized approach to management, such as the TBM Management System, the right digital manufacturing software can help communicate strategic vision enterprise-wide and track progress against it. For example, the Dploy Solutions suite of operational excellence tools allows your organization to:

Communicate long-term vision

Using an X-Matrix, Dploy Solutions shows everyone at a glance where the organization is headed over the next three to five years. And it breaks down these aggressive goals into annual objectives. Team leaders and cross-functional support teams understand who is responsible for what, and by when, to help the company succeed.

Track performance linked to goals

Once teams understand what needs to be done to achieve the company’s vision, they can identify and track key performance indicators (KPIs) that are linked to those goals. Real-time bowler charts let leaders instantly see if teams are on track to hit KPI metrics, or where they are falling behind.

Create, manage, and align projects

Web-based project management tools allow you to connect specific initiatives to strategic objectives, and then create detailed action plans forseeing those initiatives through. People get up-to-date roadmaps for accomplishing specific objectives, and they can see how their work relates to the company’s overall mission.

Visualize long-term performance trends.

Leaders and executives can get a big picture view of how performance is progressing across the enterprise. They can identify what’s working and what’s not, and they can shift strategy as needed to keep the company moving toward its goals.

Ultimately, with Dploy Solutions, you can execute better and faster on strategy in ways that keep people connected to it, and working toward it, every day. See this 2-minute video of how it works.

Seeing It Is Achieving It

Your executives envision breakthrough performance. Tools like Dploy Solutions let you make that strategy visible and relatable to everyone in your organization, and track progress toward goals it in real time. When everyone on your team stays connected to the enterprise’s ultimate objectives, you’ll be in a much better position to make operational gains, and sustain them long-term.