Anticipate the future
Harrison prepares for the future by first acknowledging that past
accomplishments don’t always mean much.
“The things that had served us well over the last 10 or 15 years
were unlikely going to be sufficient to maintain our level of contribution to the company’s result over the decade we’re into now,”
Harrison says.
To get a better idea of where things might be headed, start by
talking to your customers and suppliers.
“I think one piece is trying to recognize when things are changing and we need to be thinking or doing things differently,” he says.
“You also talk to your customers; you talk to your suppliers.”
With customers, Harrison is trying to understand what drives
their businesses and how P&G can create value.
“Every customer has a little bit different set of value drivers, and
so it’s important for us to understand how we can enhance the
value creation process, which we obviously want to turn into a
growth engine for the company,” he says. “Our hope and our
expectation would be that as we create value for customers, that
customers will reflect the value we’re creating by reinvesting or
supporting our business in ways that give us disproportionate
growth.”
With suppliers, Harrison is always looking for innovation.
“We have several suppliers (whom) we have very close technical working relationships with … that’s clearly an area of great interest
to us as we continue to try and source more and more of our innovation from outside the company, and we have a goal of getting 50
percent of our innovation from external sources, and our suppliers
are a good source of that,” he says.
Once you have input from customers, suppliers and all your
internal experts, you can start putting together a plan.
“You try and build in the best data you can from your business
leadership in terms of where that is going to be, and you put that
into an analytical model that really looks at things like distribution
costs and transport miles and wage rates and construction costs
and all of those,” Harrison says. “I don’t want to say out pops a
model because it doesn’t, but it starts to build a road map for you
that you can then follow as it goes forward.
“The group that’s doing this, we’ve got manufacturing folks, distribution folks, sales people, R&D, a lot of information systems
people, we’ve gotten some external consultancies involved, we’ve
been soliciting customer input on where they think their business
is going. And out of all of that data in the hands of people who are
knowledgeable in their fields comes a piece of work that gets guided and certainly vetted by some modeling to be sure you’re on
track. It’s more than sticking pins in a map, and it’s a lot more than
plugging data in. It’s really a very interactive process with people
who are knowledgeable, backed up by some good analytic tools.”
