Event Stream Processing / Decision Management. Measurement, Metrics / Closed-loop and OODA Feedback (to strategy and business planning). Departmental, Project and Program Budgets / Resource Allocation. Operational plans (PLM, production control, procurement, logistics, after-market service, maintenance, etc …). 
Optimization (inventory, production, logistics, marketing, etc …). Supplier, Facility, IT, Human Resource and Capacity PlanningĮlements of detailed business planning and budgeting:. Marketing Management / Social Media Analytics. Strategy and Planning Dashboard (linking strategy with objectives, goals and metrics). Scenario Planning (for options, pessimistic/optimistic, best case/worst case, etc …). Resident inside of this business planning process is the Analytics Sandbox – a combination of agility with the power to know.Įlements of high-level Business Planning with the Analytic Sandbox: This in turn requires dividing our current monolithic planning process in two – the detailed single-scenario plan that eventually spawns an equally detailed budget, and the high-level business planning where agility has recently become paramount if not mandatory. The key insight is to keep this analytic package together, but to deploy it where it does the most good, not in support of execution, but in support of scenario planning. Not a new concept to be sure, but refining the definition of its proper role does help to clarify its relationship to the overall business planning process. I tried to make the case that the control tower is fundamentally tactical and best suited to supporting operational execution – it’s not a strategic platform.īut still, there does seem to be the need for a control-tower-like capability in support of strategy and high level planning, an agile capability that mirrors at the strategic level the executional agility a control tower provides at the operational level – an entity which I am going to label the Analytic Sandbox. In my last post I somewhat castigated the emerging universal control tower approach, which purports to solve practically all your business problems including hunger and world peace, an approach where the overstuffed control tower included capabilities spanning from analytics to simulation to alerts to dashboards. In that previous structure I envisioned a three-level process structure, with the Strategic Plan and the Forecast at the highest level, informing an 18-month rolling PLAN (not forecast) in the middle tier, driving the Budget(s) at the lowest level. 
This appraisal has in turn caused me to reassess the approach I introduced some time ago in this post, “Rolling forecasts, or Who ordered that?” and to restructure the diagram representing my view of the ideal business planning process. My critique of Control Towers in this blog last time led me not only to consider the role and relationship a control tower might play in the planning process, but also to evaluate the overall planning process itself. Analytics gives us not just the ability but the imperative to separate our planning activities into two distinct segments – detailed planning that leads to budgets in support of execution, and high-level, analytic-enabled business/scenario planning.
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