Long-term planning and forecasting in Europe

In January 1968, in the light of the Consultative Assembly's recommendations (Recommendation 516) aimed at giving the Work Programme a forward-looking dimension, the Secretary General invited a group of personalities of world-wide reputation to discuss the role they thought the Council of Europe might play in the field of long-term planning and forecasting. Following this meeting, which was attended, among others, by MM. Pietro Ferraro, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Robert Jungk, Johan Galtung and Professor Karl Steinbuch, a number of proposals were formulated with a view to intensifying co-operation between member countries in the field of future research at both governmental and non-governmental level. Such co-operation was intended, inter alia, to lay a scientific foundation for work concerned with the future which might find a place in the activities of the Council of Europe. The first step in this direction would be to compile an inventory of European bodies engaged in long-term planning and forecasting studies and of their activities (research, seminars, publications, etc.).     

Chartering strategies for shipping companies

This paper describes a model which may be used in the evaluation of the relative effectiveness of policies used in the areas of ship chartering and the switching of combined carriers between the dry cargo market and the tanker market. The policies for chartering and market switching are expressed in the form of ‘desired proportions’ of the fleet operating in a particular charter-mode or a particular market. Graphical illustration of this form of expression of policies can be easily understood, so that alternative policies can be designed with relative ease. The effectiveness of a particular form of policy under various freight market conditions can be determined from the model, the use of which is illustrated by its application to the deployment of the fleet of an hypothetical shipping company. It is assumed that the feedback connection between the company's actions and the marketplace is negligible.     

Environmental pollution and economic growth: Implications for corporate planning with an Indian case study

This article attempts to analyze the implications for Corporate planning, in developing societies, of the ecological debate. The emerging nations desperately need growth to raise the base living standards of the vast majority of their populace. Yet, the ‘backlash’ of the western movement for environmental preservation has spread to the third world. How is the dilemma resolved? Can growth and environmental balance coexist? A distinction must be made between the degradation caused by squalor or lack of growth and that emanating from growth. The spread of the basic amenities of life will reduce the former. The latter can be controlled by planned location and regulation of industrial growth. The corporate planner, therefore, needs to scrutinize the ecological implications of any project carefully before arriving at any value judgement. ‘Pollution scanning’ is now part of environmental scanning. An Indian case study highlights some of the issues involved.     

Long-term planning in the U.S.S.R.

This article illustrates the U.S.S.R. approach to long-term planning and the relationship of cooperative planning within the Comecon countries. The conception of planning which the author puts forward is comprehensive and is illustrative of what is being attempted at the macro level in the centrally planned economies.     

Strategies for planning

In recent years there has been a good deal of discussion amongst planning specialists and academics about the gap which exists between the theory of planning as set out in journals and textbooks, and the practice of planning in private and public organizations. Planners are continually complaining about the resistance to planning by top management and operating managers in divisions and departments.In this article the author aims to produce a reconciliation between theory and practice and to discuss what alternative strategies are open to planners in devising planning systems for their organizations.He suggests that the problem has its origin in the fact that corporate planning theory was first developed by management scientists as a total systems approach. Corporate planners have failed to sell an integrated planning system either as programme budgeting or as corporate planning. Research suggests that a management team can only adopt and implement a comprehensive planning system in very special circumstances, e.g. when the organization's survival is threatened, a new management team has been appointed and the staff of the organization are ready to accept radical change.In normal circumstances the planner is wrong to advocate a ‘root and branch’ solution. He must diagnose the planning needs of the organization and his objective must be not merely to establish a particular planning procedure but rather to discover how he can best improve the quality of management decisions.Recent studies on strategy formation indicate that the introduction of a formal planning procedure is only a partial answer to the problem of improving the quality of management decisions.The paper reviews various approaches to planning and considers how they relate to organizations with different strategic problems, with differing organization structures and various management styles.     

Developing a planning culture for more effective strategic planning

The literature of long-range planning is replete with justifications of the need for strategic planning and admonitions concerning its critical importance. However, both the literature of planning and its practice, as manifested in a variety of organizations as diverse as industrial firms, educational systems and law enforcement agencies, are deficient in specifying proven techniques and methodologies for marshalling organizational resources to effectively implement strategic planning.Over a period of years, the authors have consulted with a variety of business organizations and public agencies in the development and implementation of long-range planning processes. From this work has come an empirically-tested conclusion that the success of long-range planning in an organization is less sensitive to the parameters of the planning techniques that it is to the overall culture within which the planning is accomplished. Since most of the non-pontifical literature of planning focuses on planning techniques and specifications for planning processes, these conclusions suggest a critical void in planning methodology.     

Strategic planning for MIS

This article report on a study of the strategic decision to develop computerized management information systems (MIS) in 32 business organizations. THe findings suggest that this decision is a complex policy decision which involves protracted environmental negotiations, a high and escalating commitment of organizational resources, and extensive organizational preparation. Eleven organizational and environmental factors which influence the decision are identified through a literature review. The influence of these factors on the success of the decision is examined and recommendations are made for managing the decision-making process to insure improved decision outcomes.     

Preventive planning for disasters

The authors have analysed the available data on disaster occurence and conclude that disasters are on the increase, especially in underdeveloped countries. They argue that a new approach to disaster is needed, one which emphasizes the continuing man-environment relationship. Within this approach, planning to prevent disaster should concentrate on long-term precautionary planning integrated into development planning utilizing, as far as possible, local awareness of the disaster problem. This long-term approach to disaster planning is a more effective way of offsetting disaster than a heavy emphasis on each individual disaster event and the relief measures which accompany it.     

Strategic planning for distribution

The process of long range planning is relatively new to both the corporation and the distribution area. Until recent years the distribution function was considered a functional area which reacted to, rather than anticipated, corporate marketing effort. New technology in data processing and other areas has provided the support capability for developing both tactical and strategic planning. With this increased capability has come a new responsibility for distribution management to be future oriented—to anticipate the appropriate support role of physical distribution in supporting both short term and long term corporate goals.     

Information systems for planning

This paper presents a view of planning as an attempt to create a desired or preferred future. Three different modes of planning in three different environments are discussed. The framework is used to examine the role of information systems to meet the planning information needs of the different environments.     

Strategic planning for resources

In the field or purchasing and supply, 1973 was a year to be remembered. A world-wide boom in industrialised countries produced record prices in markets for food, raw materials and manufactured goods. Rates of inflation in the U.S.A., Western Europe and Japan began to approach South American levels. The value of the dollar, the pound and other major currencies fluctuated dramatically, and the stock market experienced falls comparable to those which occurred during the slump in the thirties. Finally, 1973 was the year of the oil embargo, when oil prices were almost doubled and oil supplies to the West were cut by 15–20%, resulting in the rationing of oil and other commodities in Western Europe.By any standards, this was a momentous year. It is conceivable that supply markets will never be quite the same again. The traditional form of multi-national business, integrated from supply to consumer markets, is fast disappearing as the companies formed in developing countries to secure the supply of oil, food and raw materials are being taken over by the host governments. Indeed it may be that after the traumatic experiences of this year, negotiations for food and key raw materials will be increasingly carried out by governments rather than by private companies.To cope with shortages and higher prices in food, fuels and essential raw materials, government bodies and public and private enterprises will have to develop new capabilities. Western governments have responded quickly by setting up Ministers and Ministries for Energy and by establishing huge budgets for research into the exploration and exploitation of alternative fuels. The large oil companies have declared that they are in the “energy business” and have bought interests in nuclear power and coal.But what does the energy and resource crisis mean for the average firm? It seems that in the 1970s we are experiencing a level of competition for supplies similar to the competition for consumer markets which first produced “Marketing” in the late fifties and early sixties.     

Strategic planning for endgame

This article is based on the author's study of 61 firms managing businesses in environments of declining demand. It suggests ways in which firms might better prepare for this problem by managing their own exit barriers and by making strategic investments to affect the level of their competitors' exit barriers.     

Horizons for strategic planning

In this paper we present a normative model for setting time horizons for planning. Provided that certain conditions are met, we can state that only part of the future is relevant for present strategic planning, and a study of the future beyond that time horizons is a waste of resources.Following the introduction the impact of predetermined planning horizon on planning is discussed. Next, the model is presented: the problem is defined, developed and solved. The discussion of the model is designed to incorporate—and to show its implication on—existing views and methods for setting time horizons for strategic planning. Thus, simplifying assumptions which facilitate the mathematical solution of the problem, are discussed and relaxed in order to show how realistic situations are illuminated by the model.     

Comprehensive planning for libraries

In the area of planning, the literature has been almost entirely concerned with planning in the business (i.e. profit) setting. Some literature does exist on planning in the nonprofit sector, but it usually deals with tactical planning of the short-term character. This is specially true in the area of libraries and many librarians have developed and do administer large, complex organization— where conprehensive, long range planning is almost completely untreated in the literature.The current paper discusses the various steps in the strategic planning process, and relates them to a situation in which comprehensive long range plans for a new health sciences library have been developed, and to a considerable degree, implemented. In this framework, the steps of developing purpose and objecives, forecasting and policy formulation, developing and choosing growth strategy, determining resource requirements and provions, developing an organizational structure, and control system utilization are discussed both in the general framework of comprehensive planning, and with respect to actual experience in the development of a health sciences library. The roles of tactical planning and the implementation of plans are also treated.     

Vendor managed inventory in tramp shipping

This paper introduces a new problem to the OR community that combines traditional tramp shipping with a vendor managed inventory (VMI) service. Such a service may replace the more traditional contract of affreightment (COA) which for decades has been the standard agreement between a tramp shipping company and a charterer. We present a mathematical formulation describing the routing and scheduling problem faced by a tramp shipping company that offers a VMI service to its customers. The problem is formulated as an arc-flow model, and is then reformulated as a path-flow model which is solved using a hybrid approach that combines branch-and-price with a priori path-generation. To solve larger, and more realistic, instances we present a heuristic path-generation algorithm. Computational experiments show that the heuristic approach is much faster than the exact method, with insignificant reductions in solution quality. Further, we investigate the economic impact of introducing a VMI service, by comparing the results obtained with the new model with results obtained by solving the traditional routing and scheduling problem faced by tramp shipping companies using COA. The computational results show that it is possible to substantially increase supply chain profit and efficiency by replacing the traditional COAs with VMI services.     

Risk control in maritime shipping investments

In this paper we extend the state-of-the-art stochastic programming models for the Maritime Fleet Renewal Problem (MFRP) to explicitly limit the risk of insolvency due to negative cash flows when making maritime shipping investments. This is achieved by modeling the payment of ships in a number of periodical installments rather than in a lump sum paid upfront, representing more closely the actual cash flows for a shipping company. Based on this, we propose two alternative risk control measures, where the first imposes that the cash flow in each time period is always higher than a desired threshold, while the second limits the Conditional Value-at-Risk. We test the two models on realistic test instances based on data from a shipping company. The computational study demonstrates how the two models can be used to assess the trade-offs between risk of insolvency and expected profits in the MFRP.     

Developing a data base for planning— A shipping industry case

The shipping industry comprises many discrete sectors, with such widely differing characteristics of markets and vessel design that they are in effect separate industries. Planning therefore requires a detailed knowledge of each industry's characteristics—a data base from which future projections and corporate strategy can be developed.

International bulk shipping is not yet rigorously confined by intergovernmental agreements, except for regulations covering safety and technical standards, and it is therefore a market open to the economic forces of supply and demand. The market for parcel tankers, which carry a wide range of liquid cargoes in small quantities, is the subject of this study of how the supply and demand balance in a typical shipping industry is assessed.     

Strategic planning for the board

Although the planning operation is regarded by some observers as unrealistic in conditions of rapid change and increasing competition, the discipline of strategic thinking and the need for strategic leadership continue to be of vital importance. The author examines the purpose of the Board of Directors and its role in the management of strategy.     

Long term planning for coal

The Interim Report of the Coal Industry Examination was published in June 1964, representing the result of Tripartite discussions between the Government, the National Coal Board and the unions. One of the principal conclusions of this report was that the government endorsed the Board's long-term ‘Plan for Coal’ as a broad strategy for the industry. It is perhaps appropriate, therefore, to review at the present time the kind of considerations which needed to be taken into account in drawing up a long-term ‘Plan for Coal’.