What Are the Functions of Corporate Planning?

Corporate planning is the process of creating a method to achieving a goal, and then monitoring the success or failure of that process. The results generated by a successful plan are sometimes positive, sometimes negative but always educationally beneficial to the company. In order to create successful business plans, you first must understand their more important corporate functions.

There is no plan that can completely eliminate risk, but one of the functions of corporate planning is to reduce uncertainty in the corporate process, according to the business experts at the Management Study Guide website. When you create a comprehensive business plan, you identify as many of the potential challenges the company will face on the way to reaching the goal. This planning can help profile each individual challeng, and then create ways to them as they occur.

A company operates under a mission statement and a set of policies that are intended to create a uniform company approach. This helps employees, customers and vendors to understand how a company will react in almost any given situation. One of the functions of corporate planning is to make sure that each plan stays in line with the company's chosen method of operation, according to business planning experts at the Consulting Network website. This keeps all of the company correspondence and business relationships consistent, which presents an organized and professional image to the marketplace.

A comprehensive corporate plan includes detailed information on how the various responsibilities in the plan will be delegated, according to the management experts on the NetMBA website. In order to successfully implement a plan, there needs to be a designation as to who will be taking care of the various aspects and how those elements will come together. Without a corporate plan in place, there would be a misuse of available personnel that could cost the company money and time.

The financial function of any corporate plan is to measure the company's progress versus goals. Each year a company creates a set of financial goals for each department and for the company in general. Those goals are then used to create a focus for each of the corporate plans that are developed. As a company executes its plans, it can measure its progress in each plan against the financial projections for the year and make any adjustments necessary to help reach those projections.