Planning in the company useful in management part AND

Planning will be discussed in the next part of the professional business plan cycle, both before and during the business. A person who starts his adventure with running his own company must know that planning in the company is a very important factor, often deciding about the success of a given undertaking. It is clear that you cannot predict everything without knowing what will happen in the future, but it is worth having a contingency plan.

What is company planning?

Planning can be used in many areas of life and in many ways. However, when creating your own business, economic planning is the most important. According to the dictionary of the Polish language (sjp.pwn.pl), the definition of economic planning is - "defining future economic goals and tasks and the manner of their implementation". According to experts, planning is a sort of organizing activities in a logical sequence, while maintaining synchronization and balance between such elements as: people, time and resources needed to perform these activities.

The role and benefits of planning

Planning in the company is used to translate specific goals and strategies of the company into feasible physical activities in the field of operational activities. Importantly, planning should not be understood only as formulating the goals of a given organization, as they should be defined much earlier. This is because it is the creation of a concept of activities composed of stages, which defines the way of achieving these goals, which in turn leads to the delineation of certain specific, physical operations and activities.

In general, planning can be considered as one of the elements of management consisting in making decisions in connection with activities aimed at causing phenomena that would not occur by themselves. The benefits of planning are certainly clearly defined paths to success and development of the company, because it is much easier to achieve something when you know in what direction it is going.

The aforementioned way of achieving goals should be specified at every level of the organization, starting from the management board and ending with individual organizational units.

Types of planning in the company

Taking into account the time frames, we can distinguish three types of planning activities in the organization. According to the theorists, these are:

• Long-term planning - covering a period of more than 5 years, serves to mark out the paths of the company's development and ways to implement what is planned to be achieved in the future,
• Mid-term planning - that is, for a period of 2 to 5 years, more detailed plans for the implementation of the company's overarching goals,
• Short-term planning - from several months to a year, defining the tasks to be performed in order to achieve the assumptions of the long-term plan. In this area, action plans are most often created - that is, the implementation of other plans and response plans that are used to respond to unforeseen circumstances, the so-called contingency plans.

As mentioned earlier, planning is a kind of creating a concept of activities, so you can also distinguish categories of these plans according to their nature:

• Strategic plans - are developed based on the strategic goals of the enterprise. As a rule, they have a long time horizon and relate to factors such as the range and distribution of resources, as well as a competitive advantage in the market.
• Tactical plans - are created on the basis of specific tactical goals to achieve the goals of the strategic plan. They have a shorter time horizon than strategic plans and focus on specific tasks that need to be performed.
• Operational plans - are oriented towards achieving operational goals in order to fulfill tactical activities. They are short-term oriented and have a relatively narrow planning scope - that is, determining what to do here and now.

Planning functions

Planning in the company, apart from many benefits, also has several important functions. Among the most important are:

• the possibility of influencing the creation of the future - to some extent - by the people managing the company, instead of accepting what time will bring;
• the ability to clearly define the goals of the organization, along with the directions of development to which the company will aim;
• influence on regulating the level of uncertainty in the operation of the enterprise and easier risk prediction;
• harmonization of activities that allows focusing attention on the economical management of critical resources;
• easy orientation among the goals of the enterprise, their hierarchy and connections;
• the possibility of preparing the enterprise to survive possible crises.