The maturity of the operational process of the company, unfortunately, is not determined by the number of years of its existence. For example, a large transport holding used to live with a primitive planning system for a number of years.
Operating plans were collected from individual branches, then merged into one operating plan. At the same time, budget indicators and cost plans were calculated separately. As the company focused on revenue, the operating plan was adjusted in line with financial indicators.
It became possible due to the lack of communication between departments, clear regulatory requirements for the organization of the planning and budgeting process, as well as the distortion of operational plans in case of cross-checking by other departments.
The company tried to solve this problem, but at first decided to choose a conservative way. The company published a number of methodological explanations which streamlined the stages of developing plans and budgets. However, the result was even worse. The forecast of volumes for transportation did not consider infrastructure bottlenecks, and by the end of the planning period, the company received unrealistic expectations for planned parameters.
Then, the company switched to full automation of the planning and budgeting process. It integrated all the steps of the development of planning parameters into one system and made available to monitor the results for each responsible department. Employees could quickly adjust the planned indicators in case of infrastructure limitations on prospective traffic volumes. At the same time, it was also possible to track the growth in revenue, which was based on an increase in expensive types of services, and timely facilitate the likelihood of those events.
