Strategic planning is one of the keys to the success of any business. For a strategic plan to provide sufficient value, it should:
Broadly encompass the relevant business operations
Consider alternatives that offer the business substantial growth
Evaluate multiple sources of cost improvement opportunities
Be sufficiently granular to provide clarity on deployment actions
The Challenge
Many companies that engage in strategic planning do it more as a necessary “evil” and do not use it in the correct manner. As a consequence, there is insufficient evaluation of the business options and their implications. Often, as a result, the strategic plans tend to be incremental in nature to the current state of the business and the full potential of the business is not realized. The inability to evaluate multiple business options and their interactions that are sufficiently quantified is one of the critical reasons for the strategic planning process being ineffective. Often, the “what-if” space explored is restricted by the ”gut-feel” or experience base of the manager involved in the process.
The Solution
SCA’s solutions offer a comprehensive modeling framework for strategic planning by providing business managers the ability to conduct a broad array of “what-if” type decision analysis on their businesses. Through an integrated finance and operations model, SCA solutions facilitates a P&L view along with key operating metrics (e.g. headcount, capacity utilization, capital investments etc) that business managers can use to assess alternative business strategies, their impact and sensitivities to market variables. Using sophisticated data cleansing, validation and integration techniques SCA solutions utilize existing ERP data to facilitate their use within the strategic planning process.
