Becton Dickinson: Designing the New Strategic, Operational, and Financial Planning Process

SOF process helps in the flow of information to the corporate level managers, who make the strategic decisions.it helps in three broad areas. Strategic Operation Finance

Role of SOF are as follows.

Strategic SOF shall understand the vision, mission, values of the company, and should be helpful for making organizational plans to achieve the goals of the company. Should sense the new business opportunity and shall help BD in such instances in executing such plans to grab such opportunity, it shall forecast the next occurring opportunities to overcome uncertainties and to bridge the gap. BD had history of acquisitions; hence plans for acquiring shall be assisted by SOF. SOF shall not only plan but need to train the managers to execute those plans; it shall check the plans execution and control. SOF shall quantify the results of a specific period to check the deviations from the benchmark. Operational Planning with proper execution is called effective plan, so SOF shall standardize activities which are to be performed to keep uniformity and shall manage the execution to reach the common goal. SOF shall integrate all the business areas to achieve the common organizational goal. Finance SOFs role in finance is also very critical as it shall compare companies growth and health with the competitors, shall keep financial track of all the departments and ensure that there are proper funds in all the departments and check the usage of funds in all of the departments .It shall project the future financial needs of the company. These are the three broad roles to be played by SOF in these areas and to integrate all of them.

The features of SOF 1993 to be kept are:

Proactive planning process to forecast and plan for the future and to reduce uncertainties. 1 Mohit jhawar.12a2hp021.scm-A.

Structure of SOF because it was comprehensive and had details of processes. Processes which helped negotiations between division heads as it facilitates rational reasoning and logic behind every decision. Clarity of the goals and budgets. Aggressive reviews and follow-ups which helped to find out errors and faults in decisions and processes.

The features of SOF 1993 which would not be kept:

Worldwide teams would be removed from the new SOF as separate data from separate teams would make the forecasting process difficult. Different SOF books were prepared for different regions. The main flaw of this process is that planners might not be familiar with that particular region which may lead to wrong forecasting. Informal feedback from the different sector heads would be changed to a formal meeting where the feedback would be given. Equalization in the calculation of incentives. Finance part of the SOF was given more importance.

Evaluation of new SOF depends upon its success and with that it needs to be employee friendly, plans made by SOF should be prevalent, its capability of integrating all divisional areas worldwide.

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