The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: strategic planning
SF Magazine: Business Resilience Through Demand Planning
February 8, 2023
“High forecasting error rates can cause a significant impact to a company’s profitability. When the demand plan is inaccurate, either excess or obsolete inventory is stockpiled, or, on the contrary, having insufficient inventory will cause stock-outs, resulting in negative revenue and reduced customer loyalty.”
Harvard Business Review: In a Volatile World, Your Strategy Must Be Flexible
October 6, 2022
“Executives routinely contend that their businesses are more unpredictable than ever before. As it turns out, they’re right. If you carefully examine the factors that drive unpredictability in complex systems, you discover that in most sectors of the economy they have intensified. The result is that the number of potential future states that executives need to account for in making strategic choices has skyrocketed.”
CFO Dive: Nearly Half of CFOs Ditching Just-in-Time Supply Chains: Study
September 27, 2022
“CFOs are left contemplating changes to their supply chains as they attempt to navigate shifting economic trends; factors such as the ongoing war in Ukraine and the lingering impacts of the pandemic as well as inflation have continued to throw up stumbling blocks for organizations across their supply chains.”
SF Magazine: CFO to CFO: Staying the Strategic Course in Crisis
September 8, 2022
“Data analytics is critical to understanding the business at any point in time and very helpful in terms of being able to develop your pandemic response, stay ahead of trends, understand what your short-term forecast should be, and develop the longer-term forecasts.”
Harvard Business Review: Setting Your Annual Budget Amid Economic Uncertainty
September 6, 2022
“What would a mild, moderate, and severe downturn do to your business as a whole and to each part? Get specific. Where are you most vulnerable to inflation? A drop in demand? A supply-chain snarl? What actions would you take in each case? Who should take them?”
CFO Journal: Take Five: Steps to Building a Strategically Adaptive Enterprise
June 1, 2022
“Finance leaders now confront an environment where both the speed and complexity of change forces them to make choices in shorter time frames and disruption has become a continuous, compounding condition. As discussed in the first article in this series, exponential enterprises with a high ability to win reinforced by a high capacity for change outflank their rivals in creating and sustaining superior valuations and performance. These two characteristics enable businesses to respond quickly and advantageously to accelerating technological, social, and geopolitical change while also remaining on-track to achieve long-term strategic ambitions.”
Harvard Business Review: 3 Stumbling Blocks that Get in the Way of Strategic Planning
April 28, 2022
“But there’s a paradox, as Adrian outlined. Budgeting takes place within the context set by the strategic plan. The point at which the budget is set is the same point at which executive and shareholder expectations are put in place. Now circumstances change. And in a flexible planning environment so too does the strategic plan. What happens to the budget?”
CFO Journal: Moving Enterprise Business Planning Into Action
April 8, 2022
“CFOs are uniquely positioned to lead the coordination needed for an EBP program, given their experience partnering with operations, manufacturing, sales and marketing, engineering, the back office, and external allies. A key component of any EBP program is establishing consistent and current data from all sources—another goal that most CFOs share—that can drive advanced scenario modeling and predictive analytics to produce timely and more accurate plans.”
Supply Chain Dive: Facing Production Constraints, Hershey Turns to SKU Rationalization
April 1, 2022
“”Often, the pursuit of growth can lead companies to develop or release too many products in their portfolios for the sole purpose of innovation,” Wilson said. “However, if there is not a rigorous internal process for reviewing SKU impact to top and bottom-line revenue, then what was intended to be innovation can lead to negative business outputs.””
