Jim Moran
Hello, my name is Jim Moran and welcome to our website.
Planuscript is the culmination of a research programme, starting in 1988 dedicated to the Product Management System. My prior career background includes Hartleys (food), Heinz (food), Avon (cosmetics), Unilever (food, beverages, detergents, personal care products) and Wavin (plastic pipes and fittings).
The Product Management System is the most important management system on earth as measured by the scale and quality of companies that have adopted its principles. This includes leading multinationals and household names such as P&G, Nestle, Heinz, Unilever, Kerry and many more. It is almost impossible to walk into a modern supermarket and find a branded product manufacturer that does not come from a company that embraces the Product Management System. It also includes multinationals in the pharmaceutical industry, motor industry and IT industry.
It all started with Brand Management but has morphed into Product Management, which is now the dominant designation. Traditionally, it has been associated with marketing and there are myriad books published on the subject. However, I now believe my background research on the subject, unearthed a much more potent force – namely, its ability to reduce and control complexity in a business environment for major gains in productivity and efficiency. This is what gives the multinationals their devastating potency and success.
Hence, the domination of the Product Management System among consumer product manufacturers. Despite the success, one of the surprising things is that there are almost no degree courses – or indeed, hardly any post graduate university qualifications in Product Management. Perhaps there are some academics out there who might like to comment on this and I would be pleased to hear from you. Please click the Contact menu and send me an email.
My career started in University College Galway, Ireland with a degree in commerce before moving to London where I qualified as an accountant. It was here I was first exposed and learned of the reporting and control procedures of the Product Management System. After almost 10 years, I left London to join Unilever in Dublin as Product Group Manager in charge of the personal care products portfolio (cosmetics) and my transition to Product Management was complete. I later joined Wavin who were experimenting with introduction of the Product Management System across Europe at the time, which proved invaluable to my understanding of the challenges inherent in its integration to a company.
The first PC was imported to Ireland in 1982 and I got my first one in 1984 and almost immediately started to design and build a simulation model that could faithfully replicate the Product Management System. I succeeded and set up MorAnco in 1988 where the simulation model formed the cornerstone of a training course on Product Management in Dublin. It was subsequently included as module in a post-graduate degree course in Dublin City University for a couple of years.
I continued to develop the simulation model through countless iterations that led to more insights on the Product Management System, including its ability to reduce complexity linked to major gains in productivity and efficiency. I believe that I may have been the first person to reference this in an article for the inaugural edition of a new Irish management magazine at the time, called Decision, in 1996 (click Decision tab). This period also coincided with consulting for a large number of SMEs, supported by Enterprise Ireland, the state developmental agency for indigenous companies in Ireland.
The latest iteration of the simulation model is now an integral part of Planuscript, representing best-of-breed interpretation of the Product Management System.
P&G
The seminal moment in deployment of the Product Management System is credited to a memo on, 13 May 1931, by manager Neil McElroy in the advertising department of Proctor & Gamble to his boss.
The memo, which appears to confirm earlier discussions outlines the case for the recruitment and deployment of additional “brand men” in order to improve company performance through a more systematic iterative approach to brand management. This included a Brand Management hierarchy, comprising a supervisory role of “Group Products brand man” supported by “Brand Man” and “Assistant Brand Man” and “Group Products Check-Up Men” for administration purposes. It also outlined the proposed relationship with the sales force (matrix structure) in addition to the approach to be taken for the successful implementation of brand strategy.
One of the key advantages advanced was that it would allow the sales territories more space to concentrate on the customer interface as their primary area of responsibility. It also touched on the logistical dimension and the efficient deployment of scarce resources. One of the interesting omissions is that there is no mention of complexity, which presumably was not fully appreciated at the time. Also, the distinction between Brand, Category and Product Management were similarly ignored in the memo.
Modern Product Management has moved on from the original Brand Management concept, which can sometimes be seen as too narrow and not as effective in protecting the strategic flanks. Neither does Brand Management fully cater for the situation where a company has no obvious brands. Ultimately, the important constituent here – and choice, is the hierarchy through which the product portfolio is structured, where Brand Management is just one option from a tapestry of rich and sometimes complex matrices, involving brand, category and generic products. The ultimate choice of the product portfolio will substantially depend on the industry sector and strategic direction a firm wishes to pursue. It is not written in stone because these things shift over time to take account of changing market circumstances.
The memo proved a catalyst for the complete restructuring of P&G along brand lines and laid the foundation for the modern understanding of Brand and Product Management. In the words of the Duffy Agency, “He got the attention of P&G’s president R. R. Deupree who shared the young ad manager’s views on brands. That view would lead Deupree to completely restructure P&G into a brand-centric organization. Seventeen years later at the age of 43 McElroy took the reins from his boss to become the president of P&G. In fact every president of P&G since McElroy has risen from the ranks of brand manager. In 1957 McElroy left P&G to become Secretary of Defence at the request of President Eisenhower”.
Memo below reproduced courtesy of Duffy Agency, 90 Washington Street, Suite 301-D Dover, NH 03820, USA
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Complexity
Planuscript arrives through extensive research into the management principles of very large multinationals where the Product Management System is core to their operations. Some of these multi-billion entities have revenues comparable or greater than the tax take of the government of Ireland and include household names such as P&G, Unilever and Nestle among others.
P&G is credited with evolving the Product Management System in 1931 – initially as Brand Management, in order to generate a price premium as payback for investing in R&D and innovation. Essentially, a brand is a tried and trusted, advertised or well know product but fundamentally still a product. Viewed from a slightly different perspective – something as innocuous a product code is a primitive brand because its purpose is to distinguish that product from all other products on the list. Product Management has now almost universally replaced Brand Management as the corporate engineering designation – even in branded companies, although P&G still retains the Brand Management description.
P&G is an outstanding company by any standards with a remarkably high proportion of brand leaders per branded range worldwide. Its dedication to quality and innovation are legendary and has achieved its zenith – the most sophisticated level of competition possible, through its ability to use internal competition as a stealth weapon. This means running competing products across the globe against their own stablemates, in order to protect and increase overall market share – despite the inevitable consequences and risk of cannibalising the existing product portfolio, contradiction?
Well, the P&G approach includes the perspective that if they successfully develop and launch a new product in any given sector, the only thing they knew for certain is that sooner or later someone will launch a competing product against them. Faced with that reality they rationalise that they should launch that competing product themselves, as a bulwark against the unwelcome incursion.
And so they do and so they succeed. If you have any doubts that any of this is true, you could do worse than visit your local supermarket and count the competing brands from P&G and Unilever in the detergent category, as one example. If you have ever had the dubious pleasure of competing against either of those two giants, you will understand full well. There is no other management system that supports internal competition like the Product Management System.
The marketing and brand management considerations alone are sufficient reason to take the Product Management System seriously and countless books are published on marketing beyond the scope here. However, there is another reason – perhaps an even greater reason, largely unknown outside the pale of the multinationals. That reason is its ability to control complexity. Complexity is the greatest enemy in business – the unseen viper that exists all around that you cannot see, touch, hear or smell but is still there lurking in the background.
Every additional variable adds geometrically to complexity and that is just for starters – it’s a mathematical fact and there’s no escaping, like fighting gravity. Every additional screw, nut and bolt adds to chaos and the more clutter you create the worse it gets. If you want to screw something up – make it complex. It is a natural by-product of all things varied that forms part of the tapestry and beauty of life and left unchecked will always outpace growth in a company, due to the inherent exponential explosion to eventually put you out of business.
There is some anecdotal but nonetheless compelling evidence that forgetting is central to human intelligence because it helps us deal with complexity in a way that some might find surprising. It’s a visceral evolutionary survival instinct, forcing us to concentrate exclusively on the information we can use by disregarding the rest. Most things we encounter daily we forget almost instantly. Throughout my consulting years, one cannot be but be impressed by the number top class owner managers encountered in SMEs who privately admit to having no qualifications whatsoever – many of them dropping out at a tender age because they were “useless” in school.
Metaphorically, they couldn’t remember the highest mountain or the longest river and failed their exams. However, if you look through the telescope from the other end – you could say they were exceptionally good at forgetting, which paradoxically gave them a unique compensating advantage because they were extraordinarily good at prioritising – in effect, reducing complexity. So rather than being the thing that defines our stupidity, forgetting is central to our intelligence because it helps us prioritise and the essence for survival in life.
The Product Management System offers a similar impact in business – by relating key variables to the product structure, the exponential growth in complexity is curtailed as the business expands. Furthermore, the product structure is unique in its ability to absorb variables, thus giving primacy in that regard. You cannot eliminate complexity in any absolute sense, you can only control it but that alone is sufficient to give the organisational dexterity to achieve competitive advantage, while others surround themselves with chaos. It will also support a diverse product portfolio with multi-strata internal competition for the highest level of competitive advantage possible.
Planuscript’s best-of-breed interpretation of the Product Management System explains why it incorporates a universal paradigm to reduce complexity. The product structure is at the core of this paradigm linked to the Senior Management Team through a Profitplan with four key control reporting functions. It represents a transfer of multinational best practice to much smaller companies, easily absorbed into the fabric of the organisation due to the availability of modern low cost computer systems.
Decision
Article by Jim Moran, referencing complexity link to Product Management, reproduced courtesy of Decision Magazine – Volume 1 Issue 1, March / April 1996
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Copyright
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