Defaulting to Action and Knowing Your Current Reality
Price is celebrating its 75th anniversary throughout 2024, and our commemoration of this milestone will dedicate special attention to the 13 tenets of the Price Way. Each post in this blog series explores one of these guiding principles, giving our blog readers a closer look at its meaning.
In this post, we’ll be looking at what execution means at Price.
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| Price team members working at the plant in Winnipeg, MB, 1966 |
In our business, execution entails defaulting to action without fear of failure. We can do this because our high-speed execution model, developed and perfected over the years, ensures success. Experience has shown us that we can achieve our desired outcome no matter what obstacles we face.
To ensure we are executing in the right direction, we stay informed by going straight to the source: to our frontline team members, to the raw data, to the depths of the details. We must know our current reality, without bias, and pay attention more to how our key metrics are trending than to their absolute values.
Armed with this information, we adjust our course as needed. We may start the year with a detailed one-year operational plan, for instance, but we review this plan quarter by quarter to incorporate new information and to deal with roadblocks as soon as we encounter them.
This same principle applies to the day-to-day operation of our plants: “Our weekly plan only lasts a few hours in production,” says Sean Gaudreau, Plant Manager of Price’s facility in Casa Grande, AZ. “Although our target doesn’t change, we need to continue to seek information at its source to course correct the plan to get to our target every hour, every day.”
It’s important for us to keep in mind that not all our objectives have the same priority but that a handful are game changers and will, if achieved, produce a successful year. It is tempting to become overwhelmed when faced with starting an enormous task or by entering a new market, but breaking these endeavors into smaller pieces allows us to focus on the next step and complete them one at a time.
| Watch the video to learn more about the execution tenet! |
We’ve found this to be true in all facets of the business, from the plant floor to our software. “Developing Price Select was a gargantuan project,” says Dave Romanchuk, Director of Enterprise Software. “Although large in scale, we followed the same process that we do for our other software projects: we meet regularly with customers and product teams to constantly guide the solution, and internally, we break the project into bite-sized, manageable chunks.”
To us, the question isn’t “Can we do this?”; it’s “How can we do this?” What sets us apart from other businesses is our ability to find out how.
