Sometimes growing the business can be seen from entrepreneurial eyes as a nightmare. Growing the business means more employees, more departments, more decision makers, going from innovation into the process that must have control, and so on. With more people and departments, planning process is more difficult than previous with entrepreneur and couple of employees. One man, one plan. More departments, more different plans and in some cases chaotic plans.
Furthermore, it is known that in the planning process, there is a big gap between different departments that have their own viewpoint of important planning details. The process is something like this:
- All departments make their own plans.
- After that, individual plans are sent to the higher managerial level to join all plans received from departments into one plan. (I have experience where this job was accomplished from operational level without strategic viewpoint. In these situations plans were only as a paper that never becomes a true or reality.)
With this process come real problems. Manufacturing, Finance, Marketing, Sales and Supply department all have different objectives and different view on their needs. Something that for Finance Department is viewed as a cost, engineers from Manufacturing Department view as a development and improvement of business processes. Sales always have problems with late delivery from Manufacturing Department and Manufacturing Department will have problems with Supply department for late delivery of raw materials. It is normal that different departments and different subsystems in one company to have a different view of the things around them. But, because of that there exist management that will coordinate that activities and that will look more strategically into the things around all departments.
The solution for better planning that will close that gap between departments (operative side of the business) and higher level managers (strategic side of the business) is integrated business planning. It is better when manufacturing has information about the market need in the next year and that information can be incorporated in their operational plans. will know what is the budget for advertising and can incorporate that limits into their plans. All of this will be possible with integrated business planning as a part of business intelligence process or solutions.
Planning is something that is based upon history and predictions. History is previous data from selling, market share, costs … Prediction is something that can become real in the future. Combination of good history data and good prediction about the future will give the better plan for whole business.
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