A Better Approach to Business Planning and Decision Making
Today’s companies operate in a rapidly changing business environment. To drive profitable growth, managers must build strategies and business plans that take this dynamic context into account, aligning a broad range of decisions with key marketplace features. Supply-chain-related and other environmental complexities make this task even more daunting, as managers must assess ever-growing market data to gauge the impact of their decisions on the enterprise. Continual market change requires frequent revisiting of decisions, and drives mounting uncertainty. To thrive amidst these challenges, managers need a forward-looking view of information from inside and outside the organization, along with the capability to use those data in developing and implementing optimal enterprise solutions – frequently and often.
The problem is that traditional decision-making practices seek to address these issues using loosely linked cross-functional teams and spreadsheet-driven analyses that typically offer only minimal variations on historical data. Further, these practices – involving high transaction costs and significant time – result in the inability to integrate several fast-changing, forward -looking events into great understanding of impact of key decisions on the total value chain and, in turn, the realization of greater value. Not surprisingly, then, many organizations expend significant effort to make marginal progress. This paper presents a holistic framework enabling companies to deploy faster, forward-looking decision-making processes that provide a total view of enterprise impact.
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