Business Enterprise Planning?

Business Enterprise Planning

What is Business Enterprise Planning?

Planning is an essential business function that requires a dedicated effort from the company’s management team in order to fully realize the benefits. Companies often have an annual planning process whereby the strategies and budget for the upcoming year are determined, but, ideally, planning should be a part of everyday management thinking. It is a mindset of continually looking for ways to make the enterprise more competitive.

Key features of Enterprise Business Planning

The EBP paradigm features three major improvements:

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  Concurrent planning across the enterprise: With EBP, planning is executed concurrently and collaboratively, rather than sequentially based on a calendar. As such, EBP eliminates the white space between functions and traditional segregated processes through parallel planning processes that are tightly integrated by common data sets, planning assumptions, and aligned performance management routines.
  
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  Integrated execution: EBP eliminates the traditional boundaries between planning and execution by using integrated processes, systems, and data sets to create the plan, issue execution instructions, and monitor performance (using carefully designed dashboards to highlight potential, expected, and/or realized variances). This turns raw data into useful insights, giving managers more time to react and enabling organizations to respond to the inevitable plan exceptions in a synchronized manner.
  
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  Continuous, systematic learning: EBP makes use of embedded feedback loops to systematically address differences between the plan and actual performance, automatically improving itself for the next planning iteration. It also helps employees ask better questions and develop more complex and insightful analyses, including business strategy support and analysis, which is something many C-suite executives are looking for.
  

With these advances, EBP is more than just an integrated plan for the entire business. It’s the central component of an ongoing management process that fills multiple roles within the enterprise.

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  Coordination: One of the biggest challenges for many organizations is coordination of planning and execution across different functions. EBP fosters coordination in a number of ways. First, it helps achieve organizational buy-in by providing a forum where views are exchanged and consensus is developed. Second, it enables a coordinated implementation of strategic business planning through aligned goals, commitments, and performance targets that are continuously monitored to help ensure the whole organization is moving in a consistent direction. 
  
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