Business Financial and Strategic Planning Software

ABOUT SOFTWARE:

DEVELOPMENT, RESEARCH & OTHER BUSINESS TOPICS:

GENERAL:

ARTICLES:

Coming Articles:

• Is long range financial planning worthwhile?
• Corporate Modeling

See Home Page for developer background.

Strategic Thinking Requires Strategic Analysis

If you do strategic planning, you need quantitative answers to your questions— and now. The IPS Strategic Planning Model can give you these answers, usually within minutes of being asked. Read on and see for yourself.

Important Notice: IPS has heretofore provided customized models for businesses. However, we will soon be offering "canned" Strategic and Tactical Planning Models for various businesses. Watch for their imminent release.

Brief Description

The IPS STRATEGIC PLANNING MODEL is an extremely powerful, yet extraordinarily easy to use software package, based on Excel and Visual Basic for Applications, that is designed to answer strategic questions in a quantitative way. In fact, it's so powerful that one person can run through dozens of scenarios involving millions of calculations in just a few minutes (see links at the left for a more detailed description of the model and how some utilities have used it). It automatically checks input numbers for reasonableness and has built-in intelligence that checks output for outlier data and consistency of assumption. These plus executive summaries that make heavy use of charts and graphs, one can quickly analyze a project without hunting down detailed reports. The improved quality of decision making will create great success and prevent mistakes. Taste it's power by examining the example below.

[ Return to Top ]

Questions That Pop Up in a Strategic Planning Meeting:

After a day of discussions, the company's situational assessment is this:

Competition is fierce and sales are flattening. Our product is well established as a premium brand, yet our profit margin is declining. In addition, our expenses seem to have gotten a little out of control. And finally, we have been approached by a competitor who wants to merge. The time is 4:00 P.M. We're meeting again tomorrow at 8:00 am. We need answers to the following questions:

Question 1: Is our pricing where it should be?

Question 2: What's the impact of significantly increasing marketing programs?

Question 3: Do we have the capacity to meet demand? Specifically:

When is new capacity needed?
What is it's impact on the company?
What if we build it and new sales do not materialize?

Question 4: What size of an austerity program is needed to earn a:

30% Gross Operating Margin
15% Net Return on Sales
20% Return on Equity
10% Return on Total Assets

Question 5: What's a good starting point to get a handle on the merger? i.e.

What's our company valued at?
What's the other company valued at?
What's a combined company valued at?

I go fire up the IPS Strategic Planning Model. I have already created a "BASE CASE" complete with fifteen year statements.

The first 4 questions are quantitatively analyzed in about 20 minutes. The last question regarding the merger took about an hour, most of which is developing a rough data set for the target company. I'm now ready for tomorrows meeting.

Of course in real life, I would try to anticipate all relevant questions and analyzed them before a strategic planning meeting.

The impact of these decisions on the company is huge. To be able to analyze them in a quantifiable way is the difference between success and failure.
How much is this capability worth?

For more information, contact us and receive a packet of additional information including reports and a Windows Media demonstration.

[ Return to Top ]