Question

What is the relationship among the marketing, operational, and financial plans? How can you ensure that they are accurately aligned?

Answer 1

A company consists of various strategic plans across different departments and disciplines. The three most important of these include the operational, financial and marketing plans. Operations consist of demand planning, strategy and operation planning, supply chain planning, capacity and inventory planning, operational KPIs and product allocations. Marketing includes planning for promotional activities, revenue generation, customer and product profitability and campaign scorecards. Finance includes strategic planning, expenses, allocation, capital investment, profit and loss, cash flow, enterprise scorecards and balance sheets. The operational activities indicate how they will affect the marketing plan for the company. The marketing and operational activities identify how the company needs to plan its finances. Thus, in this way, all three of these plans are interlinked with each other.

Some of the ways in which this alignment can be improved are:

· The managers have to communicate the company strategy clearly to the employees by setting goals or objectives for each department, namely, marketing, operations and finance.

· Activities or goals in each of these departments have to be connected, which would help in reaching the integrated business goals of the company.

· Employees have to be made aware of the interconnection between the departments and encouraged to work effectively for achieving the goals.

· The managers need to arrange a scheduled meeting for discussing the progress in aligning each of the departments' tasks.

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