Definitions, and the abbreviations

Tour plan — an MR's advance commitment of where they will work on each day of a period: which town or beat, and which doctors and outlets.

MTP — Monthly Tour Plan. The tour plan for the coming month, submitted before it begins and approved by the reporting manager.

STP — Standard Tour Plan. The repeating baseline pattern a territory works to: which beat is covered on which day of the cycle, before month-specific adjustments.

Beat — a defined geographic cluster of doctors and outlets worked together in a day. Also called a route or a section, depending on the company.

The relationship between them: the STP is the pattern, the MTP is this month's version of that pattern, and the DCR is what actually happened. Companies that manage coverage well look at all three together. Companies that don't usually have all three and compare none of them.

Why the approval step is the whole point

Plenty of field organisations record tour plans. Fewer treat the approval as a real control, and that distinction decides whether the document does any work.

When a first-line manager reviews an MTP properly, they are checking something specific: does this plan cover the doctors who actually generate prescriptions, at the frequency their grade requires, within the working days available? An MR left to plan alone will drift, understandably, toward doctors who are easy to see, geographically convenient, and pleasant to meet. Those are not reliably the doctors who write.

This is the last cheap intervention in the cycle. Catching an under-covered core list on the 28th of the previous month costs a conversation. Catching it on the 25th of the current month costs the cycle.

Which is why a tour plan that is submitted and auto-approved is worse than no tour plan at all — it produces the paperwork of control with none of the substance, and it lets everyone believe the check happened.

How a tour plan is actually built

Working from the inputs, in the order they constrain each other.

1. The doctor list, graded

Every doctor in the territory is categorised — commonly A/B/C, or Core/Important/Others, with names varying by company. The grade is meant to reflect prescription potential, not familiarity. This is where most tour planning quietly fails, because grading is done once at territory creation and then never revisited, so the plan optimises against a picture of the market that is two years stale.

2. Frequency norms per grade

Each grade carries a required call frequency per cycle — an A-grade doctor might be called on three or four times a month, a C-grade once, with the exact numbers varying by company, therapy area and territory type. Multiply grade counts by frequency and you get the total calls the cycle demands.

3. Working days available

Net of holidays, leave, meetings, and any planned ex-HQ travel. This is the constraint people skip, and it is the reason plans fail arithmetically before anyone sets foot outside.

4. Beat structure and geography

Doctors and outlets cluster geographically into beats. A day's plan should be one beat, or an efficient sequence within one, because travel time between calls is the largest controllable cost in a field day.

The arithmetic check nobody does. Total required calls ÷ available working days = calls needed per day. If that number exceeds what an MR can realistically achieve in your territory type, the plan is already impossible — and no amount of mid-cycle effort will rescue it. This single calculation, done at approval, prevents more missed cycles than any report does.

Plan adherence: the number that gets misused

Comparing the MTP against the DCR gives plan adherence — what proportion of planned calls actually happened. It is a genuinely useful number and it is also the one most often weaponised.

Used well, low adherence prompts a question: was the plan wrong, or was the execution? Both happen, and they need opposite responses. A plan that was arithmetically impossible should be fixed at the planning end, and punishing the MR for missing it guarantees the next plan is padded to be safely achievable — at which point the planning process has become theatre.

Used badly, adherence becomes a target in itself, and you get high adherence to undemanding plans. That looks excellent on a dashboard and produces nothing.

Adherence is a diagnostic, not a KPI. The KPI is coverage against target by doctor grade. Adherence tells you why coverage moved.

Where tour planning breaks

  1. Approval as a rubber stamp. If managers approve every plan within minutes of submission, no check is occurring. Look at approval timestamps — they tell you the truth quickly.
  2. Stale doctor grades. Coverage targets compute off grade. Ungraded or misgraded lists produce confident, wrong numbers throughout the cycle.
  3. Plans that ignore working days. The arithmetic check above, skipped.
  4. No mid-cycle visibility. A plan reviewed only at month end is a historical document. The value is in seeing deviation on the 18th, while nine working days remain.
  5. Plans disconnected from expenses. Where travel entitlement is not derived from the approved plan and the actual route, expense reconciliation becomes an argument every month.
  6. Unplanned visits with no route back into the plan. Real days include genuine unplanned calls — a doctor available unexpectedly, a chemist issue. A system that cannot record those cleanly forces the MR to either misreport or omit them.

Common questions

What is the full form of MTP and STP?
MTP is Monthly Tour Plan — the coming month's day-by-day plan, submitted in advance for approval. STP is Standard Tour Plan — the repeating baseline pattern the territory works to, which the MTP adapts for a given month's holidays, leave and campaigns.
What is the difference between a tour plan and a beat plan?
A beat is the geographic unit — a cluster of doctors and outlets covered together. A beat plan defines those clusters and their coverage rhythm. A tour plan assigns beats to specific days for a specific period. In everyday use the terms blur, and many companies use "beat plan" for both.
Who approves the tour plan?
The first-line manager — Area Sales Manager or Area Business Manager, by whichever title the company uses — with visibility and sometimes a second approval at regional level. The approval is meant to be a substantive check on coverage adequacy, not an acknowledgement of receipt.
Can a tour plan change mid-month?
It should be able to, with a record. Markets move, doctors travel, camps get scheduled. What matters is that a change is captured as a change — visible, attributable and dated — rather than the plan being quietly rewritten to match what happened, which destroys the adherence signal entirely.
How does a tour plan relate to expenses?
Directly, and this is where a lot of monthly friction originates. Where travel entitlement derives from the approved plan and the actual recorded route, the claim substantiates itself. Where the claim is a number typed into a form at month end with no link to the day it funded, reconciliation becomes a negotiation — and under current documentation expectations, an unsubstantiated claim is a weaker record than most companies realise.