Business planning and support by IT-systems

Abstract

Business planning is one of the basic tasks of corporate management. Although a detailed presentation of all different business aspects is beyond the scope of this chapter some important characteristics of business planning will be presented. The main focus will be on support by IT-systems, starting by identifying different areas like modeling and manual planning. Then different system categories used for planning purposes will be compared. Important examples are spreadsheets and OLAP based systems. Last but not least some fundamental concepts within planning systems will be discussed, like handling of hierarchies within dimensions and modeled calculations. For this purpose, some implementations will be outlined using software of SAP, Microsoft and the open source solution Palo.