Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning involves taking on a strategic outlook of the organization beyond just the next operating year and monitoring your progress towards this outlook. It often takes place at a more aggregate level within the organization and account structure and involves only senior level managers. It is also typically done at an annual level, not by week or by month.

Within CPM there is no limitation on the number of years forward you can plan. For each year and each version of the plan you can choose your desired periodicity whether it be monthly, quarterly, or yearly. CPM also allows you to plan at either the General Ledger account or reporting line level (groupings of General Ledger accounts). You can even define different calculation rules for the strategic plan than those that were used for the budget.

Once your strategic planning outline and rules have been defined in CPM you can begin to define your growth and/or inflation factors. Use Net Present Value on capital projects to determine which projects offer the best return for the organization and to ensure that projects which would result in a Return on Investment lower than the company's targeted rate of growth are not chosen as well as provide a well defined strategic road map to the organizations that can then be measured and tracked through key performance indicators and Balanced Scorecards.