What is Strategic Planning and Why Does it Matter?
Strategic planning is one of the most important things you can do for your organization. It helps you not only paint the picture of where you want your organization to be in the future, but also draws the roadmap for how you’re going to get there.
Having goals is crucial for any business. Companies generally don’t thrive and grow by accident. However, having those goals is only the first step. You need to know what the steps to reaching them are, what challenges lie in the way, and what you’re going to do when those challenges arise. The better your plans, the quicker you can address the challenges.
Key Factors in Developing a Strategic Plan
It is equally important to know both where you want your organization to be in five years as well as next year. Your short-term goals will act as checkpoints along the journey to your long-term goals. While articulating these, you’ll want to make sure to craft a clear mission statement to help bring your entire organization into alignment on where the ship is trying to steer and why.
Geospatial tools can be helpful in accomplishing your goals. There are a variety of ways they can help you provide useful insights that support your organization’s operations. Geospatial tools can help you determine the best areas for expansion, understand your supply chains in greater depth, reveal location-based trends in your consumers, and so much more. The more exact your understanding of your business and customers is, the more sure you can be in your next steps and your plan.
A key step in formulating your strategic plan is conducting a SWOT analysis. All four components – your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – can be examined in greater depth through geospatial insights.
If one of your strengths is a particular location of your operations, there are many geospatial factors that can be contributing to that. Spatial analysis using demographic data such as census blocks and local parcel data can help you understand the population within proximity to the store. This information can be used to characterize new locations with similar populations. Geospatial tools can create an easily understood map that helps your leadership visualize results without having to sift through pages and pages of data.
Perhaps a weakness of your operation is high distribution cost and long turn-around time for acquiring inventory. Geospatial tools can provide a deeper understanding of your supply chain in a manner that’s easy to understand. They can help to optimize distribution points in relation to upstream suppliers and downstream retail locations. It can also help to identify gaps that may require new supplier relationships to fill.
When analyzing the opportunities, understanding geospatial factors can help capitalize on them. If you want to expand your operations in the Northeast, a geospatial analysis of commercial locations could tell you what parcels are ideal to target based on municipal taxes, proximity to distribution channels, demographic make-up for sourcing labor and finding consumers, and environmental factors such as frequency of natural disasters.
Similar analysis can help identify potential threats that may have been previously unrecognized. As you’re looking at expanding in the Northeast, perhaps you notice there’s a very limited number of properties that ideally suit your needs, and the majority of them that exist are already owned by one of your competitors. This presents you with an opportunity to reassess your market entry strategy.
Devise a Strategy
After completing your SWOT analysis, you’ll want to put pen to paper on your strategic plan. Be sure to make the steps in your plan actionable, clear, and measurable. Your steps and strategies should align with your organization’s values and mission statement. Incorporating geospatial analysis into your plan of action is important, as well. Geospatial insights can provide excellent visualizations of data and progress towards your goals.
Execute Your Strategy
Executing a strategic plan across all business departments ensures alignment, efficiency, and goal achievement. Effective communication fosters collaboration, breaking down silos between teams. Proper resource allocation optimizes budgets, personnel, and technology, preventing inefficiencies. A well-integrated plan leverages geospatial skills and tools, placing them where they add the most value—whether in logistics, marketing, or risk assessment.
This enhances decision-making, improves operational efficiency, and boosts competitiveness. Geospatial insights drive location-based strategies, ensuring businesses optimize site selection, route planning, and customer targeting. A strategic, cross-departmental approach maximizes the impact of geospatial tools, leading to smarter business decisions and sustainable growth.
Evaluate and Control
Monitoring progress on a strategic plan requires tracking KPIs to measure success and identify areas for improvement. Geospatial KPIs, such as delivery efficiency, store performance by location, or market penetration, provide location-based insights to optimize decisions. Regular analysis ensures alignment with business goals, allowing for timely adjustments. By leveraging real-time geospatial data, businesses can refine strategies, improve resource allocation, and adapt to changing market conditions for sustained success.
Common Challenges and Solutions
Change is often met with uncertainty. It’s important to foster a culture of open communication and honesty about the direction of the organization with all your players on all levels of all departments in order to get everyone on the same page. Here, geospatial analysis can contribute to ensuring that decisions are data-driven. Maps are a great communication tool for aligning your organization around your goals.
Another common problem with effective implementation of a strategic plan is working with inadequate data. Data collection has to be the number one priority of your organization at all levels in order to ensure that data-driven decisions can be made accurately and effectively. In a geospatial context, ensuring that all tools being used enable location as a first-class citizen is paramount. This way, all data collected is location aware from the onset of your plan’s implementation.
Commonly, geospatial tools and data are stovepiped and underutilized. Modern geospatial systems can live side-by-side with other line-of-business tools used in strategic planning and monitoring, such as ERP and CRM. It is no longer necessary to have fully dedicated geospatial tools and expertise that resides outside of mainstream business systems. Ensuring that geospatial analysis is tightly integrated will help ensure that strategic data-driven decisions are also location-aware.
Conclusion
Most organizations understand how location affects their operation, but the cost and effort of integrating geospatial analysis into strategic decision-making is often seen as too high. Modern geospatial tools and practices, when deployed in targeted ways, can ensure that location is properly accounted for in goal-setting and execution. If you’d like to learn more about how Cercana can help you maximize the value of location in your strategic planning, contact us here.
