TABLE OF CONTENTS You yourself are actually a planning machine.
David Allen [46]
We are now ready to take the basic principles we identified in the previous chapterand apply them to changing how the product flow of an enterprise and its supply chain are planned.We will also define a few additional principles to guide us.
[46]Allen, David, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-FreeProductivity, Viking Press, New York, 2001.
Since we believethat planning is performed primarily to make good decisions, we need to begin with those decisions.We have laid out some typical product flow decisions in Figure4.1 on the same diagram we introduced in Chapter 1. Fromleft to right, we work from decisions that are acted on right now, through tactical decisions thatimpact the next few weeks and months, to strategic decisions that may be implemented over a periodof years. From top to bottom, we consider the various flows in the supply chain. At the top aredecisions made primarily by our suppliers and at the bottom decisions made by our customers. We donot attempt to break out activity by our suppliers suppliers or our customer s customers, althoughthose decisions can be critical in some supply chains.
In Figure4.1, we present a range of generic decisions that are made by a universal enterprise thatperforms most types of supply chain activity. There are certainly a large number of decisions shownin this diagram. There are many more decisions that could be added here if we looked in detail...
