An interactive heuristic for financial planning in decentralized organizations

Planning and controlling overall performance in decentralized organizations is a complex task for central management because it is confronted with incomplete information on organizational opportunities and possible conflicts of interest with local managers. Many formal procedures for the support of planning processes in decentralized organizations are based on decomposition methods for mathematical programming. Most of these procedures assume organizational decision models with a single overall goal that is supported by all decision makers involved. In this paper, a framework for an interactive heuristic planning procedure is proposed for decentralized organizational decision models with multiple goals that may be conflicting within and between decision levels. This procedure aims at solving the planning problem straightforwardly in a low number of information exchanges between the decision levels, which makes it more acceptable for decision makers in practice.