Finding Interesting Planning Problems

I have surveyed my research subject, Planning, and I would like to introduce the content of my research in this article.

• What is planning?
• Planning problems in Business
• Budget planning (for university)
• What prior studies are underway?

1. What is planning?

With a vague understanding about Planning, I started by reading some Wikipedia pages on Planning.

Planing is the first and foremost activity preparing a sequence of action steps to achieve a desired goal. A plan is like a map. When following a plan, a person can see how much they have progressed towards their project goal and how far they are from their destination. (Wikipedia “Planning”, 2020.08.)

Example of planning process framework ⓒWikipedia

With the above concepts, the overall planning process should be as follow:

1. Set the desired objective identifying what an organization wants to do.
2. Specify ordered action steps from the initial state to goal state with some parameters to define the performance index.
3. Execute the action and evaluate the plan. (This is an intermediate state.)
4. Formulate alternatives if the execution doesn’t meet the index by changing remain steps and make decisions.
5. Repeat this process until the goal is achieved.

Many fields and areas do planning to maximize the efficiency of their limited resources(time, money, human, etc.) to achieve their goals. From now on, I would like to focus more on Business-related planning such as business planning, financial planning, and marketing plan to reach my final destination, AI for marketing problems.

2. Planning problems in Business

In the above section, we found that stating a goal is the first and foremost thing to do in planning. Can there be any purpose other than making a profit in the business? Because there are many stakeholders inside and outside, it is not that simple.

Externally focused business plans are usually for financial stakeholders such as investors, customers, donors, governments, etc. On the other side, internally-focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. These include the development of a new product, restructuring of finance, or the refurbishing of a factory.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property, management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines. (Wikipedia “Business Planning”, 2020.08.)

When I studied business as an undergraduate, each subject was so vast that it was covered in a semester’s worth of subjects. Large enterprises are actually split into many specialized area departments, and they interact with each other to achieve an enterprise-wide goal.

3. Budget planning (for universities)

Each division needs its own professional knowledge and as a starting project, I decided to start the Budget Planning, which manages the budget of my graduate lab, and this will be done by building a simple DBMS for it. I hope this project will lead me to a deep study that creates a more universal budget planning model for universities and even many enterprises.

Someone might wonder what is new with this project from plenty of other budget planning systems. The difference from the existing systems lies in “automation” that directly reflects the implementation of planning in the modification of planning.

Good planning requires timely modifications of the plan in the course of execution because it is important to minimize risk to the goal. However, frequent modifications require a person to make a highly complex thought process and a lot of energy, time, and cost.

How nice would it be to utilize a lot of data from the past to automatically make and analyze multiple scenarios and find the best alternatives?

From now on, the study of planning is directed toward automation with minimal human input.

4. Prior research on budget planning

Listing up prior research achievements will continue to be updated until the end of the project. (The most recent update is: August 31, 2020)

1. long-range budget planning in private colleges and universities (1977)
2. Planning models in higher education: Historical review and survey of currently available models (1981)
3. to be continued…