enterprise Planning - Short Term, Medium Term and Long Term Goals

As the owner or administrative of a business, you have business goals. You have your 5-year goals or your long-term goals, and then there are steps along the way to reach those goals: medium-term goals and short-term goals.

If you were a retailer you might have the following goals:

The Food Pyramid

Short term: sell a certain number each sunny day, a certain number each rainy day, a certain number each holiday, weekend and weekday.

Medium term: recognize your best suppliers. Construct relationships with the most efficient, timely, trustworthy and innovative suppliers. Attract a higher number of baby boomers than your competition.

Long term: Continue to create innovations in the marketplace that can set you apart from your competition, such as innovative loyalty programs or bleeding edge point-of-purchase technology.

In business planning and business execution management, key execution indicators (Kpis) are basal to knowing where you are in your path towards a certain goal.

This is what Wikipedia says about Kpis:

A execution indicator or key execution indicator (Kpi) is a portion of performance. Such measures are commonly used to help an assosication define and value how prosperous it is, typically in terms of making advance towards its long-term organizational goals. Kpis can be specified by answering the question, "What is genuinely prominent to different stakeholders?"

Wikipedia mentions long-term, but that misses out on prominent short-term and medium-term goals which I'll illustrate shortly. The other key term here is "stakeholders."

Each goal, whether short-term or long-term, has different stakeholders.

If you have daily retail sales goals, then a store manager has to have entrance to data that shows him or her in real time what's going on in the store.

If you have regular or each year goals vis-a-vís your suppliers and different customer segments, then an operations man or sales director needs entrance to information that shows how you're doing along these paths.

If you have long-term plans to create innovative solutions and come to be a market leader, then the Ceo or owner needs entrance to key data to know how you're doing against these plans.

Different time-frames, different stakeholders, different goals, different Kpis.

What tools are available to help you along the path?

David Abdo wrote a post entitled "Business brain Software: Who Is It genuinely For?" where he argued for the democratization of business brain software across the enterprise.

The existence of a multi-tiered goal buildings as visible above implies the requirement of a business to implement a business brain tool that's accessible to all people within the company.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

enterprise Planning - Short Term, Medium Term and Long Term Goals