Companywide planning is essential for dealing with a volatile business environment. Here are 5 important KPIs that can ensure its successful implementation.
The business world is currently undergoing a high and complicated pace of change, which has driven organisations into pursuing successful ways of adapting to the new and volatile environment. This will ensue only if constructive companywide planning is meticulously examined and put into practice. Explicitly, companies need to engage in powerful processes and strategies in order to meet both the organisation’s goals and objectives and adjust to the changing market demands so as to accomplish customer satisfaction and business growth.
1. Optimum strategic pan
The company’s leaders ought to carefully consider market needs and business objectives in order to set out their long-term goals, preferably for the next two to five years. Once these are set, the other departments will be able to form their own strategies and action plans for securing progress. What is particularly useful for effective planning is the establishment of milestones and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure and assess performance. At the same time, it is important for every company to adopt a market-oriented approach in its planning that focuses on what the business offers to the marketplace.
2. Efficient Scenario planning
Another crucial KPI is the implementation of scenario planning in terms of costs, mitigate risks, and the acquisition of competitive advantages. Indicatively, each organisation should be able to forecast various scenarios with regard to projections, budgets, and forecasts, so as to determine the outcomes of potential future actions. This also includes any negative effects as this enables the company to gain more comprehensive insight for taking the right decisions. Correspondingly, an analysis of the current and future business portfolio planning is particularly useful for evaluating market growth rate and relative market share.
3. Useful external insights
What is extremely beneficial for any company is to consider scenarios based on external data sources, such as seasonality, unemployment levels, various costs and prices, web analytics, etc. A comprehensive data collection tool can use such data to gain accurate forecasts that will lead the organisation’s finance department into taking the right decisions and, generally, propel the entire company to success through executing the most advantageous plans. Similarly, a company should always engage into discussions with its external partners that target to improve the performance of each department separately and of the company as a whole.
4. Valuable customer feedback
It is generally agreed that customer feedback is essential to both sales and marketing departments. However, a company must not oversight its effect to the entire companywide planning. To this end, finance leaders should regularly interact with clients for understanding how their responses influence their company and what strategies to implement in order to keep their customers satisfied and loyal. In this way, the organisation will be able to create customer value, enhance customer relationships, and ultimately increase profitability.
5. Well-integrated companywide planning technology
Last but not least, a company’s success largely depends on efficient integrated planning technology and software, in order to break down silos as well as to visualise and predict the key to business growth. More accurately, such technology connects plans across the organisation, discerns important financial and operational patterns based on the available data, and, effectively, identifies the best solutions for each department through intelligent and powerful dashboards. Fundamentally, it promotes a flexible and collaborative way of working that has proven particularly beneficial to company environment and success.
Oracle NetSuite has the best solutions for achieving the most effective companywide planning. In particular, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting automates these processes for saving time while maximising the accuracy of the company’s finance team. Specifically, this solution gives access to real time, accurate, and updated financial and operational data, which are automated and hence less prone to errors. Notably, since all stakeholders are connected in a single environment, streamlining data collection instead of relying on various different emails and spreadsheets, the finance team benefits from this collaboration by acquiring meaningful input. Finally, this solution ensures transparency, due to the fact that all data is within one centralised place while any changes are immediately reflected in reports and dashboards. All aforementioned contribute to improved forecast accuracy since comparison between actual and projected results is performed regularly, helping each company to achieve its own goals and objectives.
For accelerating your organisation’s budgeting and forecasting processes and achieving optimal companywide planning, you need to invest in the right solution. NetU is an, Oracle NetSuite Solution Provider for Cyprus and Greece, is helping many businesses to fulfil their strategic goals with great success. For more information, you can contact a NetU expert who will happily assist you with any query.