Your initiative is detrimental to the growth of your enterprise and its sustained competitiveness in the market. You have worked with your CEO/CFO and key business leaders; your thought process and action has created general awareness and opposition within the enterprise in the last few months. You feel that the proactive business leaders in your enterprise need to initiate a performance management program within your enterprise so as to build a robust strategic integrated infrastructure and process. From our experience, it is quite natural that you came across the following experiences:-

• Your annual budgeting process has big fans in your enterprise and it is still revolving around the finance function. Why should it change?
• Business units are engaged in short term business performance and there is no time for any strategic process. Why should we look at anything beyond the next quarter?
• Activity based planning from business lines are still on disparate foci. It is not integrated in plan for a consolidated view of the financial plan operating numbers. Why should a Marketing expense be known to Finance and Sales?
• Your long term strategic business plan is done for the sake of doing it. The long term business plan and its derived rationale to the short term business plan (current budgeting process) are not defined. Capital expenditure is only based on immediate regional growth perspective.
• Your monthly management reporting structure has obsolete information and your top management has no other option.
• Strategic and operational objectives and initiatives within the organization are not linked and hence monthly accountability results in lots of number crunching and reconciliation.
• Strategy execution process based on balanced score card or a strategy focused planning is the next step in your agenda.
• Corporate reporting is in ‘excel’ and it is a combination of data from many ‘excels’ from numerous sources!
• Forecasting is based on unrelated business functions and numbers. Marketing plans does not synchronize with Sales plans and hence with production – Procurement plans is not in sync with long term production plans and hence resulting inventory is not planned at all.
• Affect on cash flow, changing market conditions and most of the proactive information which is critical for decision process is still a reactive process top down.
• Your internal IT does not understand your initiative and your core requirements for a strategic infrastructure for strategic processes. They are experts in transactional systems and networking and hence they speak a different language to you.
• Planning and performance management is a key area which everybody wants improvements in; but there remain questions “How?” & “When”.