Internal Practice Assessment (IPA)
What is it?
Internal Practice Assessment (IPA) is an organizational diagnostic tool to get you from your retailer feedback results to a better, clearer action plan, faster.
Our retailer feedback demonstrates your relative strengths and weaknesses in the eyes of the customer, but this can be hard to convert into a well-focussed plan for change in your business. IPA is a parallel survey of sales, marketing, supply chain, and related personnel in your business, designed to identify practices that have the greatest perceived opportunity for improvement, and those that your people feel have the most impact. We then use this information to identify an internal action plan to improve with customers.
How does it work?
In our work with clients, Advantage International has developed 100 “practices” that impact effectiveness with customers. Each practice is related to one of the factors that retailers measure. Using AG’s confidential web-based survey, each participant reviews this list and rates their company on “room to improve” and “impact with customers.” They then enter their views and comments on how to improve the way the business works. This is done at the same time as the retailers are undertaking their surveys. We compile this data into a report that works with the “opportunity areas” as seen by the retailer, adding an additional level of “diagnosis.”
What does it give you?
- A prioritized short list of “must fix” areas of improvement.
- A clear action plan to tackle the areas of concern expressed by customers.
- An opportunity for your wider team to engage in the process of continuous improvement.
- A tracking tool to measure internal change going forward.