A planning team arrives in the morning.
Before they can decide what needs to happen today, they first need to understand yesterday. Did we process what we expected? Did we use the labour we planned? Where did performance move away from plan, and why? Most importantly, what does any of that mean for today?
In a lot of operations, getting to those answers takes time.
The information is there, but it is spread across reports, spreadsheets and different operational systems. Someone has to bring it together, compare what happened with what was supposed to happen, work out where the gaps are and then start asking questions.
In practice, planners are having to bring the picture together themselves before they can make a decision.
One planning team we work with described their current morning simply: “My morning starts with reporting on yesterday before I can focus on what we need to do today.”
Only once that work is done can they start understanding why performance differed from plan and, more importantly, what they need to do about it.
That feels like the wrong place to spend a planning team’s time.
What if the investigation had already started?
A better morning doesn’t start with another dashboard. It starts with the planning team already having a clear view of where yesterday moved away from plan.
They should be able to see where actual performance differed from expectation, whether labour, productivity or demand contributed to the gap, whether any operational events help explain what happened, and which parts of the current plan now need attention.
The value isn’t in giving the planner more information. It’s doing the work of bringing it together so they can get straight to the decision.
By the time the planning team starts the day, the latest actuals should already have been assessed and the areas that need attention brought to the surface.
The morning can then start with the exceptions, rather than with the admin required to find them.
From “What happened?” to “What should we do about it?”
For one of the planning teams we work with, the fuller picture of the previous day may not become clear until 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning.
That is not just reporting time. It mean’s today’s decisions are being delayed by yesterday’s analysis.
If the key exceptions and likely causes are already clear, the conversation can start somewhere more useful.
Instead of asking: “What happened?”
The planning team can start with: “We know where the problem is. Why did it happen, and what do we do about it?”
As one team put it: “We’ll be able to ask the correct questions instead of asking a blanket, ‘What happened?’”
That is a much better use of planning time: less effort spent finding the problem, and more time working out what to do about it.
Giving planners time back means using their experience better
The point isn’t simply to save the planning team time. It is to stop wasting their expertise on work that a system can do more effectively: finding data, copying numbers between spreadsheets, reconciling reports, checking formulas, tracing variances and chasing people for the context behind yesterday’s result.
All of that takes time, but it isn’t where experienced planning teams add the most value.
One of the teams we work with described how much of their time today is spent digging through the data to build a clear enough picture to act on. If that picture is already there, they can spend more time exploring their options, challenging assumptions and making better-informed decisions.
That is where their experience matters.
Automation can handle more of the gathering, calculation and comparison. The planning team can spend more of its time understanding the choices, testing alternatives; considering the impact of different actions and deciding what to do next.
Planning time should be decision time
This is bigger than morning reporting. It is about what we ask planning teams to spend their time doing.
Too much of that time is still consumed by collecting information, reconciling sources and rebuilding a view of the operation before a useful decision can even be made. That is work automation is well suited to.
A dashboard can tell a planner that yesterday missed plan. A useful planning system should have already worked out what that changes about today.
Decision intelligence can go further than showing what changed. It can work through the implications, recommend how the labour plan should respond and show the planning team the impact of that recommendation.
The planning team then brings the operational judgement. They understand the context behind the numbers, the practical realities on the floor and whether the recommended action is right for that moment.
At Predyktable, we take the latest actuals, understand where performance has moved away from expectation, update the starting position and generate a revised plan based on where the operation now stands – all before the planning team has even walked through the door.
The aim isn’t to take the decision away from them. It is to make sure that, when they start the day, the investigation has already been done and their time can go into deciding what happens next.