Effective strategic action planning: a process and tool

Purpose – This paper aims to describe an interactive action planning software tool (TAPS) for manufacturing objective deployment, and to report the results of its application in five companies. Design/methodology/approach – A process approach based on action research was adopted in this research. Under this approach, a series of four to five workshops were conducted in each company. Each workshop took half a day and involved a multi‐disciplinary team of four to six managers. Besides direct observation in the workshops, a structured questionnaire was also used to elicit managers' feedback at the end of each workshop. Findings – The TAPS approach (integration of Burbidge's connectance concept and the analytic hierarchy process) helps managers to visualise and represent their perceptions of the relationships between variables and objectives through a sequential, analytical process. Results from the case studies indicate that TAPS provides the following benefits to managers: it improves collective understanding, reduces the complexity of strategy deployment into manageable steps, facilitates discussion, and manages organizational knowledge. Research limitations/implications – The research is so far limited to application in five case studies. Future research will involve further cases and improvements to the usability of the software tool. Originality/value – For practitioners, the paper provides them with an interactive software tool (TAPS) for effective strategic action planning. For academics, this paper provides an approach for researching strategy deployment, and a potential classroom teaching tool for operations management.