A framework for strategic control and planning in corporate organisations

The purpose of the paper is to test and to develop the capabilities of a conceptual framework for strategic control and planning in corporate organisations, called adaptive control methodology (ACM). A comparison is made to the current practice in a large multinational organisation in the food industry sector, i.e. BSN/DANONE. Three case studies analysed in previous papers are briefly described. These results are generalised in order to provide a typology of these problems in terms of important characteristics: the length of the time horizon, the more or less recurrent character, the existence of uncertainties, irreversibility or real options in the planning and control processes. These elements lead to successive developments and improvements in the initial framework. In this way the latter is brought to better match real-case problems in a broad range of strategic applications such as budget preparation, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, process and post-merger reengineering.