Your business goals are hopeful wishes if you don't have a plan to bring them to fruition. Manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to turn their business objectives into action. With the chaos of the corporate ladder, it's not always easy. Aligning your company goals with business strategies creates a roadmap that motivates employees, improves business, and creates a common purpose for every level of worker at your company. 

Strategy deployment does just that. Strategy deployment is a system that correlates your company vision or objects to actual tasks, from corporate to mid-level and frontline workers. This unique system helps employees work toward a common purpose, simultaneously moving the company in the same direction, known as true north. 

Common reasons strategies fail are unclear communication, vague responsibilities, and overcomplicating strategies. Improvements in efficiency and company culture only come from clearly communicated company goals and tasks. There are four essential steps to strategy deployment. 

Four Steps to Take Your Manufacturing to the Next Level 

Identify your company vision and objectives

Your company vision is a necessary step to moving forward and seeing improvements. The entire point of strategy deployment is to implement realistic steps that help your company achieve its objectives. You can’t start planning or taking action before identifying your overarching and long-term goal. Identify a common objective to ensure all employees are on the same page. For example, your manufacturing company's vision could be to produce quality products in a timely, efficient manner.

While your vision should be your company's overarching purpose and long-term goals, when creating a strategic plan, narrow down your objectives into attainable goals. 

Create a strategic plan

Before taking action, you need to develop a plan, starting with your company objective and goal. When creating your plan, address specific issues at every job level. Strategy deployment is all about getting everyone on the same page. Addressing those seemingly minor issues is what will set your company on the right track. Your company goal or plan should focus on problems that can be solved within a year. While helpful to make long-term plans, short-term plans focusing on each employee position (from corporate to frontline workers) will create tangible and realistic ways to solve problems. 

Be sure to develop how your plan connects to your company vision. You want all your workers to be on the same page with things, which means connecting the why to your strategic plan. From the company vision established, you can produce realistic, short-term goals that result in real improvements within the company. 

Let’s go back to the first example. From this vision, you can then find tangible goals to achieve in the next one to five years. For example, since your vision is to produce quality products promptly, you could plan to introduce technology into your production line to make things more efficient and accurate. Automation eliminates human error since technology is programmed to repeat a specific task, so it would be beneficial to introduce this in some form. Likewise, since you want to produce quality products, you could create a checklist for employees to follow that outlines what makes up a quality product.

Once you have a solid set of realistic objectives, the next step is to form tasks on each level of employees to turn your goals into reality. 

Delegate Tasks 

Even though your company goal should be the same for all your employees, achieving that goal will look different for each level. Frontline worker responsibilities are vastly different from mid-level managers. Strategy deployment takes into account the different roles of everyone and establishes tasks that are specific to each level. Let’s go back to our example. 

The overarching company objective is to produce quality products timely and efficiently. The tangible goals are to introduce automation to increase efficiency and create a quality checklist that ensures all products sent out are up to snuff. How does this look for each employee? In what ways are workers contributing to the overall company objective and goals? 

Frontline workers have a different level of responsibility since they are generally the ones making the products. They would need to learn how to work with technology and what this new addition looks like for them in the warehouse. Likewise, they would also be responsible for following a quality checklist. 

For mid-level managers, these responsibilities would look different. Introducing automation for managers may look like using a better productivity tracker for workers. Quality production could look like overseeing warehouse productivity and ensuring protocols are followed. It could also look like a second quality check for each product sent out. 

Each level will look different with the tasks they are held accountable to. The important thing is to implement each goal at each employee level in the most appropriate way. 

Empower Employees and Adapt to Changes

Strategy deployment is about finding areas that can be changed and adapting to the unexpected. If the tasks you lined out for your employees aren't working, reevaluating is crucial. Certain levels may have more responsibility for each goal than others. Find how you can apply your goals in the most fitting way for each employee. Encouraging employees in their new responsibilities by reminding them why they are taking on these new tasks is beneficial. Your company vision is the why behind everything you implement and gives employees purpose in what they do. 

Strategy deployment is used again and again at any phase in a company. It brings everyone back to the purpose of their work and helps manufacturers achieve the quality results they seek.

Impact Washington, a local MEP, is here to help manufacturers instill a plan of action. Contact us to see how you can apply the principles of strategy deployment to your manufacturing company.