“The supreme task of business management is to identify specific business goals through which an ultimate goal, long-term profit maximization is to be achieved, as well as the formulation of business policy, i.e. “a marching route” which the enterprise has to adhere to in order to achieve these goalsas efficiently as possible.”
Planning is one of the key managerial functions and therefore applies to all fields and aspects of an organization: Economy and Finance, Informatics, Quality, Human Resources, Logistics and Transportation, Organizational management, Marketing, Services, Production.
According to the period in which the planning takes place, one can distinguish between Strategic planning, Tactical planning and Operational planning. Forecasting deals with the prediction of a company´s long-term development.
Tactical and operational planning plays a key role in organizational fields which are characterised by frequent fluxes of resources, namely financial resources and material in production process (purchase and sale).
Different types of business plans * Financial plan (integrates all plans with the help of a financial statement) * Sales plan * Project plan * Production plan * Human resources development plan * Personal Development Plan * Investment plan * Maintenance and repair plan
Partial plans must be interdependent.
The essence of planning is the determination of goals or target values and, possibly, ways how to achieve them. Planning has to taken all relevant internal and external factors affecting the achievement of goals or target values into account.
The fundamental plan of an organization is its global strategy.
- Bidirectional Planning (Top-Down/Bottom-Up)
- Progressive Planning (Bottom-Up)
- Retrograde Planning (Top-Down)
- Strategic Alternatives
- Strategic Management
- APS (Advanced Planning & Scheduling)
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
- MRP (Material Requirements Planning)
- MRP II (Manufacturing Resource Planning)
- JIT (Just-in-time)
- DBR (Drum Buffer Rope)
- SCM (Supply Chain Management)
Financial planning includes:
Analytical techniques used in planning: