"Do you get the picture? A steady flow of manufacturing. No funnel. No poking around with sticks. Today there aren't any stock chasers. None is needed. Work reaches the stockroom on time. Orders are filled complete the same day they come in. Inventories are lower. Oh, heck, need I go on?"
No, he needn't. For already he has shown us how the motive force was applied at the right point to get results. Take this plan apart—or any other plan that really works—and you will see that it is built upon the FOUR ELEMENTS OF PLANNING.
They make the PLANNING wheels go round.
Now it's time to take your own job of planning to pieces and see if it, too, does not meet the test.
Here, again, as when the ANALYSIS was made, it helps to set things down on paper. In charting, you will find that by painstaking application of our four principles along the lines diagrammed in the figure on [page 65], you can LAY OUT A WORKING PLAN depending for its approach to perfection only upon the amount of thought put into it, and upon the degree of accuracy with which the analysis of the job was made.
The chart you make may be only a guide to the complete plan. Some plans require details which utterly preclude any form of expression so simple as a chart. Other plans can be laid out on the actual chart shown.
In any event, the very attempt to put your plan into diagrammatic form will develop PRACTICABILITY AND ACCURACY OF ARRANGEMENT. The very necessity of having to indicate and to select the primary force back of your job or business; having to trace that force through the various activities necessary to completed work; and then having visibly and physically to concentrate all these activities at one point—those very acts which making a chart compels you to perform, enforce a mastery of the essential details of your business and a grasp of their relations which every manager should have.
Perhaps the plan you have isn't as hot as you think it is.
An office manager friend of ours was pretty proud of his system until one day he charted it.
His company was famous for the quality of work turned out. But the service it gave was wretched. Special instructions were often ignored. Delivery dates were overlooked. All that sort of thing.