Strategic Planning: New or Different or Better

“What can we be doing that is new or different or better to achieve our goals?”

Ahaus Vice President Jeff Sheridan posed this question to a team of leaders at Ahaus as our fiscal year began this fall. As the group evaluated the work that our strategic planning team has accomplished so far, it was time to look forward to next steps.

Since beginning the latest round of strategic planning in FY 2020, dozens of Ahaus team members have worked toward three overarching goals:

Improve sales by BUILDING OUR BRAND
Increase financial performance by IMPROVING CONTINUOUSLY
Prepare for the future by DEVELOPING OUR TEAM

The group meets regularly to check up on progress and work across departments to collaborate on larger plans and ideas. Since this team began meeting in 2019, over 120 strategies and tactics have been started – most of these are complete and others are still in process moving into 2023.

Long-term projects like succession planning to ensure that decades worth of knowledge and skill from our veteran employees is being transferred to our younger team members have required cross-departmental collaboration, as have conversations and strategies around working safely, sharing data effectively, and creating and using improved processes.

Moving into calendar year 2023, the team has high hopes for the new strategies in process to work on the three main goals. Engineering Manager Mark Price said, “After coming off our highest volume year of production ever in 2022, many areas for improvement have become evident for us to focus our efforts on in 2023. Many of these areas of improvement will build upon what we have accomplished previously which is quite exciting. I’m ecstatic to work with our team to keep the momentum of improvements going strong in 2023.”