How does Strategic Planning affect ERP?

Strategic planning is a management tool, period. As with any management tool, it is used for one purpose only: to help an organization do a better job - to focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future.

ERP systems provide support to execute strategic plans for even to the smallest manufacturing company. Your future competitive advantage is based on a series of uncertain events: how you deal with those events is your ticket to your success. Enterprise Resource Planning is a comprehensive tool for integrating accounting, strategic planning, sales order management, quality control, manufacturing, logistics and warehousing.

One section of your strategic plan should identify quantifiable time phased business objectives. Metrics should be developed around these goals and your ERP system should be reporting on any data that relates to your business objectives. In implementation Seradex project managers ensure that this is a fundamental corner stone of the project.

Sample Strategic Planning Metrics that can be driven from ERP Data:

Achieve sales of $xx million by 200X
Report annualized profits of $xx million in 200X
Reduce average lead time to 5 days by 200x
Reduce late orders to less than 2% by by 200x
Achieve 3% cost reduction every quarter
Employ xxx people including xx% technically qualified by 200X
Have sales offices in xx key markets before 200X