Business Plan and Objectives

A business plan helps you create business objectives, accomplish a set of activities, and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the objectives. You can manage Business Plan and Objectives to support various retail business operations:

Create a set of important activities to achieve a business objective.
Operate with speed and efficiency at cluster, account, product, customer, and location levels.
Plan downstream activities such as route planning, visit management, clustering, and business objectives.
Map the business plan and objectives to a unique set of targeted account clusters for better execution.

As a marketing manager or sales administrator, you can

Create a Business Plan and Objectives.
- Create a set of important activities
- Devise and publish objectives
- Create and track KPIs for performance monitoring
Associate the business plans and objectives to accounts and clusters to meet your business needs.
Manage publishing operations for the business plans and objectives.

When you publish a business plan or objective, account-level tasks are created based on the tasks defined in each business objective. During the store visit appointments, your salesperson can perform these tasks.

Create Business Plan

As a marketing manager, perform the following steps to create a business plan:

On the springboard, click Business Plan > Create.

Create business plan page appears.
Specify values for the fields such as business plan name.
Click Save and Close.

Your business draft plan is now saved in the Draft state.

Note:
Remember, you can add objectives to a business plan only when the business plan is in the draft status.

Proceed to Submit for approval.
Go to the business plan summary page, select Actions > > Submit for approval.

Your business plan is in the Pending Approval state.

Based on your approval flow, your business plan is now Approved.

You can now proceed to add objectives to this business plan.

Add Objectives to Business Plan

Objective helps you manage your workforce efficiently by creating and accomplishing cluster-specific, account-specific, store-level, segment-level, and route-level efforts.

From the business plan summary page, click Objectives > Create for a new objective.

Specify values for the fields such as business plan name, category, and owners.
Click Save and Close.

Your objective is now saved in the Draft state.
Add an objective-level KPI by clicking Create Objective KPI.
Specify Objective KPI name, select KPI Library, specify values for the fields, and click Save.

You can also delete and split an existing objective KPI.
Proceed to create the activities that your sales team can perform as part of an objective.
Go to Activities sub tab and click Create Task

Specify the suitable subject, priority, category, other task fields and save the task.

Note:
Create Appointment and Log a Call activities aren't supported.
Sign in as sales administrator or marketing manager role to approve the objective.
Go to the objectives summary page, select Actions > Submit for approval.

Your objective is in Pending Approval state.

Based on your approval flow settings, your objective is Approved. Remember, you can publish objectives that are in the Approved state. Ensure you approve the objectives for publishing the business plan.

Note:

If you want to exclude a task from publishing, select Exclude check box. If a task is excluded then Account objective task won't be created for this task. There won't be an account copy for the task and the task won't get scheduled for appointments. If after publishing, you attempt to exclude a task then the published objective task will be marked as obsolete.

Note:

You aren't allowed to delete a task if the associated objective is already published. If there is an Account Objective task associated to an objective task then you can't delete the task.

Create Objective Task, Objective Accounts, and Objective Clusters

As a marketing manager, perform the following steps to create objective task, objective accounts, and objective clusters:

Click Business Plan icon on the Home page.

Business Plan landing page opens.
Select the business plan that you created.
Click Objectives subtab.
Select an objective that you created.
Click Activities subtab.
Click Create Task button and provide details.
Use Store visit type subtab to associate a dynamic store visit type to an objective task.
Click Save and Continue.
Click Accounts subtab.
Click Add to add accounts.
Click Clusters subtab.
Click Add to add active clusters.
Click KPI subtab.
Click Create and provide details.
Click Save and Close to create the record.
After the record is created, you must specify start date and end date on the details page.
To verify an account objective under an account, drill down to an account and go to Objectives subtab.
To verify an account objective task under an account, drill down to an account and go to Account Task subtab.
To verify an account objective KPI under an account, drill down to an account and go to KPI subtab.

Lifecycle of Business Plan and Objectives

When a business plan or an objective is created, it will be in draft status.
Click Actions > Submit in order to submit it.

Status changes to pending approval.
Click Actions > Approve or Actions > Reject.

Status changes to approved or rejected.
When Status is approved, click Actions > Publish.

Status changes to published.
A scheduled process runs and if the process is successful, status changes to active. Otherwise status changes to approved.
You can also opt to publish later by selecting the publish later option and specify the time to publish using schedule publish.
When status is active, click Actions > Revise.

Status changes to revised.

Create KPI Library

Create a library of KPIs (for example, sales growth for account or cluster), assign them to a plan and objectives, and track the performance.

Click KPI Libraries > Create.

Specify values for KPI name, Type, Target and other the fields.
Click Activate to activate the KPI.
Click Save and Close.

After you create the KPI Library, proceed to associate with an objective.

You can map the KPI library items to objective-level KPIs. You can now publish KPIs to Accounts.

Associate Objectives with Accounts or Clusters

To perform the activities and tasks across multiple accounts and clusters, associate the objectives with individual accounts or with clusters:

Go to Business Plan > Objective > Accounts or

Business Plan > Objective > Clusters
Search, select, and apply the account or cluster.

The selected account or cluster is now associated with the objectives.

Publish Business Plan

Sign in as sales administrator or marketing manager role to publish business plan to clusters. Before publishing a business plan, set objective to approved status. Remember, you can publish business plans and objectives only in the Approved state. When you publish an objective, all tasks or KPIs under objective are created as account Objective task or Account KPI. You can check the same from Account task or Account KPI subtab of accounts.

On business plan summary page, select Actions > > Publish.
When you publish, the status of business plan and objectives changes to Published by initiating a scheduled process AcoBulkProcessing.
When the scheduled process is successful, the business plan state changes to Active
- You can verify and confirm the publish action from the scheduler.
- When the publishing process is unsuccessful, the status of business plan and objectives remains in the approved state. Fix the errors and republish the business plan.
- You can verify the published activities or tasks from Accounts > Activities > Tasks.
Your business plan and its objectives are now published to Active.

To improve performance, you can now track and manage the publishing based on the last publish date field.

When you publish for the first time, all the tasks and KPIs are added to all the accounts and clusters associated with the business plan and the objective.
When you add any new accounts or clusters after the last published date, the job publishes the changes only for those new accounts or clusters.
When you add or revise tasks or KPIs, republish adds the revised tasks and KPIs to all accounts and clusters.

For example, you associate 10 accounts to a business plan. When you publish, the new tasks and KPIs are created for all these 10 accounts. When you revise a business plan or objective, add 2 new accounts, the job publishes the changes for the newly created accounts only. When you revise or add a task or KPIs, the job publishes the changes to all the 12 accounts.

Note:

To do a full publish, delete the value of the last published date from the objective or the business plan summary pages.

Publish Objectives

Here's how you can publish objectives:

Approve a business objective.
Click Actions > Publish and click Save.

Status of business objective changes to published. The scheduled process AcoBulkProcessing gets initiated.
After the scheduled process completes, the status of objective changes to active.
If the scheduled process results in error, the status of business objective changes to approved.
Check for any errors and rectify them before republishing business objective.

Publish KPI

Publishing KPI is a part of publishing objective where KPI records created under objective are populated to associated accounts. The account KPI will have a reference to both parent objective and KPI objective. You can't edit the target value in the account KPI but there is another field negotiated target to update the negotiated target value. Initially, the record will be in draft status and you can either approve or reject the KPI as the account manager. After the KPI is approved, you as the account manager can either complete or cancel the KPI.

Republish KPI

In account KPI, updatable check box is selected by default and editable. The update option works for records that have updatable check box selected by default.

Additional Information

You may find the following additional information useful while working on the business plan and objectives.

You can use business plan and objectives as a standalone solution for individual account or in combination with clusters.
When you publish a business plan to an account or clusters successfully, the state of business plan and objectives is Active.
To delete objective, go to objective summary page, select the Inactive option to mark an objective inactive. On publishing such inactive objective, the account objective tasks are marked as obsolete.
To delete a task in an objective, go to task details page, select the IsObsolete option to mark an objective task as obsolete. On publishing the objective, the specific account objective task is
You can publish only the approved objectives or business plans.
You can change tasks only when the associated objective is in draft or revised status.