Question

Describe the ise of the integrated Strategic Finacial Planning model as promoted by Kaufman. What are it's advantages according to him? What are your throughts about it's applications?

Answer 1

integrated Strategic Finacial Planning model as promoted by Kaufman

The Kaufman Hall Strategic Financial Planning Maturity Model for higher education addresses these issues by creating a four-stage process that replaces the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets many currently use for budgeting:

• Stage one, which is where most higher education institutions are today, focuses on operational needs for a single year. Budgeting typically occurs only once per year and is performed using spreadsheets.
• Stage two continues to focus on operational needs, but covers multiple years, with budget activities being evaluated two to three times per year. It also moves away from spreadsheets in favor of a unified enterprise performance management (EPM) solution that offers basic data integration from disparate sources and alignment of actual to budgeted data and formatted reports.
• Stage three covers multiple years with quarterly or even monthly budget reviews. It incorporates all funding sources, with integration of targets from long-range planning to budgets including target setting, direct data integration, financial dashboards, institution-wide scenarios and multiple hierarchies.
• Stage four, the highest level of maturity, is a strategic multi-year approach that reviews the budget on a continuous rather than scheduled basis, with fully automated reporting and planning that includes all of the previous improvements plus bench marking, dynamic workflows/approvals, ad hoc reporting, operational dashboards, and more.

"Current operational budgets used by most higher education institutions make it difficult to see the big picture and make strategic financial decisions that will help them weather industry market shifts," said. "HE , the manual processes they rely on are time-consuming, prone to human error, and make it difficult to connect real-time labor, tuition, and grants information from their external general ledger, student systems, and human resources systems, to their budgets. Implementing the Maturity Model framework will provide visibility into external drivers and the ability to model scenarios to make better, more-informed decisions impacting the long-term success of their institutions."