Strategy Management overview

Strategy Management is an extension to the Infor Corporate Performance Management application that helps organizations develop, communicate, and monitor strategic plans by providing a clear link between strategic goals, detailed operational plans and actual results.

Strategy Management provides an environment for building a strategic plan, establishing targets for successful completion and then monitoring the plan against actual performance.

Strategy Management can be used with a variety of methodologies, such as balanced scorecard, as well as allowing organizations to define their own methodology. Sample plans showing different methodologies are supplied with the application.

Plan objects are the building blocks of a strategic plan. The planner defines the different types of plan objects and these correlate to the planning methodology used within the organization. For a traditional plan, object types include Objectives, Strategies, Tactics and Assumptions.

Organizations can include object types specific to their own methodology and can combine them with different planning methods. For example, they might choose to implement some form of Balanced Scorecard that might not necessarily adhere to the formal Balanced Scorecard methodology. These different plan objects are used to create a plan. Users can assemble objects into hierarchical structures that show relationships and dependencies. For example, one planning object might be a particular strategy, while other objects that feed into it represent specific activities required to implement that strategy. Strategy Management is designed to support organizations where corporate defines specific goals and strategies, and then require operational managers to build their own tactical plans to support those goals. These operational managers only see their part of the plan, but senior management can then view the plan holistically.

Plan objects can hold a range of information including a name, description, a start date and number of periods for the life of the object, the person responsible for delivering the goal, a note, its priority, a weight that determines its effect on a parent object, a category, and attachments. These objects might also contain measures that relate to the goal. For example, if the object represents an objective to achieve a profit goal, the target value could be set to 5 million. Measure values can be financial, such as revenue or margin per product, or non-financial, such as training hours completed or customer satisfaction ratings, or logical, such as yes/no. An object can have a variety of scenarios for targets such as reported, stretch target, best case, and so on, as well as the actual result. Objects can also be assigned to particular units.

Target values for an object can be specified for each scenario from a variety of sources. This can be manual, from a CPM view, or any SQL compliant source. Actual values can also be entered from the various sources.

The plan is held within a multidimensional model whose members are initially defined by an administrator. The administrator sets the units, periods and scenarios. These dimensions and members do not need to be the same as a CPM model as there is a mapping facility to pull data into the module from a view.

As well as holding information entered into the plan, such as actual and target information, the module also calculates two other pieces of information called Outcome and Activity. Activity answers the question of how well is the plan being executed. Are people doing what was planned? The execution performance on the leaf objects is a percentage calculation that compares actual to target for each of the scenario targets and are cumulatively weighted rolled up for the parents. Outcome answers the question of whether the plan is generating the desired results. Are the outcome objectives being achieved? Outcome value is always a percentage calculation for any object with a measure.

For example, a strategy to 'Sell into the customer base' might have a target of 2 million in sales spread by quarters. The actions (leaf objects) supporting this strategy might include customer mailings, seminars and special offers. When looking at the success of the plan, the Outcome calculation for 'Sell into the customer base' will show how actual revenues per quarter compare to the 2 million target spread over quarters. The Activity calculation for the same plan object shows the cumulative implementation of each supporting activity (the weighted rolled up value). In this way it is possible to show the impact of activities on goals.