By: Roelof Groesbeek from Flowplan (July 2021)
Enterprise value optimisation is the raison d’etre of the CEO and his/her executive team. Optimised financial performance is one side of it and minimising the cost of capital being the other side. Optimising enterprise value must be embedded in all business functions; it is paramount to highly effective planning, enterprise performance management, as well as risk management.
The challenge for any organisation is not only to shorten the planning process, but also increase the frequency. During the planning process, right through the entire budgeting cycle, all the organisational functions e.g., marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, HR, and finance must be fully aligned. The current business environment, as demonstrated by the COVID pandemic, demands that the organisation must be agile in adapting to rapid changes, and therefore decision quality must be improved. Time to market must be faster than the competition to capitalise on new opportunities, time to action should be swift. Ex post facto reporting on, and analysis of, failed strategies and tactics are not considered good enough any longer.
What is required is a disruption of the “business-as-usual” way of running an organisation. Interconnected management processes, with an end-to-end feedback loop, ensuring continuous synergies between people, systems, and processes, to produce a Gestalt effect, where the whole is greater than the sum of their separate effects, is required. This can be achieved by connecting strategy, people, processes, assets & information across all business functions. The time for silo-ed planning and analysis is long gone!
