Strategic Objectives Engine

This engine will be designed to ingest, interpret, and operationalize a company's annual corporate objectives, providing a real-time "strategic compass" for all S&OP decisions.

1. The "Objective Library" (The "What")

First, we need a good idea of what objectives companies might have. ChainAlign will have a pre-configured library of common corporate objectives, which can be broken down into the S&OP data elements we already manage.

Common Corporate Objectives:

Profitability Focus:

Increase EBITDA Margin by X%

Improve Gross Margin %

Increase Net Profit

Growth Focus:

Achieve Revenue Growth of X%

Gain X points of Market Share

Increase New Product Revenue to X% of total sales

Efficiency & Working Capital Focus:

Lower Working Capital by X% or $Y

Improve Inventory Turns to X

Reduce Cash Conversion Cycle by X days

Customer & Service Focus:

Achieve a target On-Time In-Full (OTIF) %

Improve Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS)

2. The "Annual Objectives Ingestion" Process

This is the process for getting the customer's specific goals for the year into ChainAlign, as you outlined. It will be part of the Admin Backend and will support two methods.

Method A: Intelligent Document Parsing (Unstructured):

An admin can upload the source document where the objectives are defined (a PowerPoint slide, a Word document, or a pasted email from the CEO).

Our LLM (Gemini) will be prompted to read the document and extract the key objectives, their target values, and their timeframes. For example, it will be trained to recognize phrases like "our primary goal for this fiscal year is to improve gross margin by 200 basis points."

The system will then present the extracted parameters to the admin for review and confirmation before they are saved.

Method B: Structured Input:

The admin can manually select objectives from our pre-configured "Objective Library."

They can then input the specific target values for the year and, importantly, assign a relative weighting to each (e.g., "Increase EBITDA Margin" - 60% weight, "Lower Working Capital" - 40% weight).

3. The "Goal Alignment Indicator" (The User-Facing Feature)

This is how we surface the intelligence to the users. During the live S&OP meeting, particularly on the Reconciliation Workbench and the Strategic Decision "Live Slide," a new, non-intrusive UI element will appear.

How it Works:

The backend maintains the active, weighted corporate objectives for the period.

When a user models a scenario (e.g., "increase safety stock"), the system calculates the impact on the underlying S&OP metrics (Inventory_Value, Service_Level, COGS, etc.).

The engine then scores these impacts against the weighted corporate objectives.

The Visual Indicator: A simple, dynamic "Goal Alignment Score" appears:

Corporate Goal Alignment: 65%

✅ Strongly Helps: Improve Service Level

⚠️ Deters from: Lower Working Capital (due to increased inventory)

🔻 Strongly Deters from: Increase EBITDA Margin (due to higher carrying costs)

Visibility Control: As you rightly pointed out, this information can be sensitive. In the Admin Backend, the customer's administrator will have granular control over the visibility of this feature. They can choose to make it visible to "Executives Only," "All S&OP Participants," or disable it entirely.