Business And Strategic Planning

Abstract

During the quarter century after the conclusion of the Second World War, U.S. manufacturers and distributors could achieve marketplace, profitability, and performance objectives without serious attention to the strategic planning needs of their individual enterprises or the supply chains in which they participated. The decade of the 1970s, however, brought a series of upheavals fueled by spiraling energy costs, economic inflation and uncertainty, and expanding overseas competition that required companies to move beyond their largely single-minded focus on operations planning and control. No longer could U.S. industry take market dominance for granted. The result was a growing interest in preparing the enterprise for change through a planning process that not only focused on business strategic elements, such as corporate objectives and resources, but also could guide the organization through the shoals of shrinking margins, the synchronization of world economies, increasing labor and materials costs, and the struggle for competitive advantage that characterized the decades that followed. Instead of stagnant, hierarchical, vertical organizations managing massive physical plant and productive assets, the paradigm rapidly shifted to highly agile, flexible organizations, dependent on information technologies and collaborative supply chain relationships centered on continuous cost reduction and optimization of core and channel resources. Today, the rapidly expanding global economy is requiring companies to acknowledge an entirely new set of dynamics based on geopolitical change, the ability of communications technologies to acess labor pools from any place on earth, and new concepts of product development, quality, and channels of distribution.