TPM Systems: Connect Corporate Planning to Event-Level Planning

Many companies today perform corporate planning (customer P&L planning) and Trade Promotion Management (TPM) event level planning in two different systems. This is a major factor in the ‘disconnect’ between original budgets, revised planning, and the detailed planning that exists within the TPM system. In most cases, once the detailed plan is created, there are no controls or processes to ensure that it is connected to your overall corporate plan. The breakdown between these two systems can often result in TPM overspends and plan shortfalls.
 

One of the keys to effective planning is to have a system that permits you to establish goals, and then set the related tactics to execute your plan. This would include goals such as market share by brand, customer profit margin, and other similar metrics.
 

Another critical key is to connect the corporate plan to the event plan, which requires that you first decide on the level of planning for both corporate and the event level planning. Typically, your corporate plan is performed at a customer and product summary level. This allows for more of a macro planning approach, in which you can perform ‘what ifs’ and quickly determine the changes in pricing, costs, and the impact to overall profit. This permits users to set goals, and then create tactics to meet these goals. Top down planning using allocation methods are essential to create quick directional views that subsequently provide for an iterative process.
 

Clearly, setting your customer and brand-level tactics is not something you want to first perform at an event level, as you must first determine if your volume, pricing and related costs will derive your desired results.
 

Once your goals have been set, and you have created your plan, the next step is to ‘connect’ this plan to your detailed event level plan. A seamless process must also exist so that base volume, lift volume and related spending at the corporate level are truly connected at the event level. This means that downstream event level changes are recorded and summarized back to the corporate planning level, thus keeping the respective systems synchronized.

 

Proper controls must be implemented throughout the planning process. Controls such as spending limits, spend per unit, and related lift-to-cost ratios are all essential to forcing compliance and approvals throughout your process. This reduces the work flow time from contract initiation through approval and finally through resolution.
 

Best practices such as:

All provide important processes, metrics and overall controls to connect corporate and event planning, while providing the efficient workflow processes.