We do not publish customer plans, and we are not going to.
A strategic plan states what an organization is betting on, what it has decided to stop doing, which numbers worry it and who is accountable for each. There are few documents a company would less like to see in a supplier’s marketing. If we published yours, you would be right to wonder what else we would publish.
So this page does something else: it describes the kinds of organization that use OGSM.online, and why the shape of an organization decides how the method lands. If one of them looks like yours, that is the useful signal.
Some of the organizations that use it
A cross-section rather than a ranking: a grid operator, a pension administrator, a seed breeder, shipping, manufacturing, higher education, public health, libraries, housing, sport, and local and national government.
In their own words
Three customers have given us permission to quote them by name.
"For Anthony Veder, the power of OGSM lies in bringing together our long-term vision with concrete planning. This helps translate our clear strategic direction at all levels."Florian KwekkeboomSustainability Engineer & StrategistAnthony Veder
"OGSM.online from Toolsfactory makes strategy tangible and forms an action-oriented compass for every company."Wesley RakhorstStrategy ConsultantAlliander
"OGSM.online gives us the structure and support to effectively work on our future."Rob HordijkManager OperationsRoyal Hordijk
The kinds of organization that end up here
Every organization thinks its planning problem is unique. In practice they cluster, and the cluster tells you more than the industry does. Here are the shapes we see most, described rather than diagnosed.
Single teams
Worth saying first, because it is a large group and the least visible one. A great many customers run exactly one plan: a management team, a board, a department, a small company. No cascading, no portfolio, no rollout programme.
They are here for three things, and they are the same three things the big organizations want. One plan everyone can see, on one page. Results that are visible without anyone assembling a report. And the review sessions arriving on their own, with the reports already filed, instead of being organized by hand every month by whoever cares most.
Regulated financial institutions
Mutual insurers serving consumers and smaller businesses through networks of local advisers. Pension administrators running both the administration and the investment management for sector funds.
Long-established, heavily supervised, and already thorough about planning and reporting. They arrive with the most detailed questions about where data lives and who can reach it, which is a reasonable place to start when the plan concerns other people’s money. Our answers →
Employee-owned professional firms
Accountancy and advisory firms of several hundred to a few thousand people, spread across many offices, where the employees are co-owners.
Genuine local autonomy combined with an ownership structure in which direction has to be agreed rather than issued. Plans exist at firm, region and office level at the same time.
R&D-led family businesses
Breeders, developers and manufacturers, family-owned, often operating in dozens of countries, whose product development runs on cycles far longer than a planning year.
A development horizon measured in years alongside an organization that still has to know what it is doing this quarter. Which is what the split between the multi-year top half of the page and the annual bottom half is for. Annual planning without losing the long term →
Asset-heavy international operators
Shipping companies moving specialised cargo. Manufacturers of vehicles, port equipment and packaging, selling worldwide.
Long-lived assets, capital decisions that commit you for a decade, and an energy transition rewriting the economics underneath. Strategy here is genuinely about choices with consequences.
Groups assembled by acquisition
Technical services and maintenance groups made up of a dozen or so companies across several countries, brought together partly by acquisition.
Each business arrives with its own plan, its own vocabulary and its own reporting. Before those plans can be aligned they have to be readable side by side, which is most of what a common structure buys you.
Public sector organizations
Municipalities, including authorities formed by merger, and other public bodies.
Public planning has a particular shape: you influence outcomes far more than you control them, and your levers are regulation, permits, budget and subsidy. A merged authority has the additional job of turning two administrative cultures into one set of priorities.
Care providers
Organizations providing care for older people and others, working in regions alongside several other providers.
The binding constraint is not demand and not really money. It is people: there are not enough, there will be fewer, and administration is part of why they leave. A care organization’s plan, filled in →
International software and technology companies
From market leaders founded decades ago to scale-ups, inside and well outside Europe.
OGSM is sometimes assumed to be a Dutch or European habit. It is not: the lineage runs through Procter & Gamble, and the model travels. The platform is used in around 20 countries on four continents.
What they have in common
Read across all of them and the industries have almost nothing to do with each other. What repeats is the situation.
They want one plan, not several. Whether that is one team’s plan or two hundred connected ones, the value is the same: everyone looking at the same page instead of at their own version of it.
The plan has to survive contact with the year. Every one of them could write a good plan in a workshop. The reason they are here is what happens in month seven.
Someone is accountable to a board. Supervisory boards, works councils, member representation, family shareholders. All of them need to report progress against strategy in a form that is honest and does not take a week to produce.
Confidentiality is not negotiable. Insurers, pension administrators, municipalities and listed suppliers do not put strategy in whatever tool was easiest to buy.
About references
If you want to speak to someone in your sector, ask during a demo.
Sometimes we can arrange it, sometimes we cannot: it depends on the customer, and we do not push people into reference calls. What we will do is tell you honestly which of these situations is closest to yours, and where we have seen it go badly as well as well.
And our own plan
One customer we can be completely open about: ourselves.
Toolsfactory runs on OGSM. A three-to-four-year strategic cycle refreshed annually, quarterly strategy reviews, monthly action reviews, and four-week development sprints planned against the actions in our own plan.
It is not a case study so much as an admission: we built the review rhythm into the product because we needed it ourselves first. How that works, in detail →
Want to see whether this fits your organization?
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