by An executive summary (or management summary) is a short document or section of a document produced for business purposes. It summarizes a longer report or proposal or a group of related reports in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all. It usually contains a brief statement of the problem or proposal covered in the major document(s), background information, concise analysis and main conclusions. It is intended as an aid to decision-making by managers and has been described as the most important part of a business plan.
An executive summary differs from an abstract in that an abstract will usually be shorter and is typically intended as an overview or orientation rather than being a condensed version of the full document. Abstracts are extensively used in academic research where the concept of the executive summary is not in common usage. “An abstract is a brief summarizing statement… read by parties who are trying to decide whether or not to read the main document”, while “an executive summary, unlike an abstract, is a document in miniature that may be read in place of the longer document”.
Importance
Executive summaries are important as a communication tool in both academia and business. For example, members of Texas A&M University’s Department of Agricultural Economics observe that “An executive summary is an initial interaction between the writers of the report and their target readers: decision makers, potential customers, and/or peers. A business leader’s decision to continue reading a certain report often depends on the impression the executive summary gives.”
An executive summary of a business plan is an overview. Its purpose is to summarize the key points of a document for its readers, saving them time and preparing them for the upcoming content.
Think of the executive summary as an advance organizer for the reader. Above all else, it must be clear and concise. But it also has to entice the reader to read the rest of the business plan.
This is why the executive summary is often called the most important part of the business plan. If it doesn’t capture the reader’s attention, the plan will be set aside unread – a disaster if you’ve written your business plan as part of an attempt to get money to start your new business.
The information you need to include varies somewhat depending on whether your business is a startup or an established business.
For a startup business typically one of the main goals of the business plan is to convince banks, angel investors, or venture capitalists to invest in your business by providing startup capital in the form of debt or equity financing.34 In order to do so you will have to provide a solid case for your business idea which makes your executive summary all the more important. A typical executive summary for a startup company includes the following sections:
- The business opportunity: Describe the need or the opportunity.
- Taking advantage of the opportunity: Explain how will your business will serve the market.
- The target market: Describe the customer base you will be targeting.
- Business model: Describe your products or services and and what will make them appealing to the target market.
- Marketing and sales strategy: Briefly outline your plans for marketing your products/services.
- The competition: Describe your competition and your strategy for getting market share. What is your competitive advantage, e.g. what will you offer to customers that your competitors cannot?
- Financial analysis: Summarize the financial plan including projections for at least the next three years.
- Owners/Staff: Describe the owners and the key staff members and the expertise they bring to the venture.
- Implementation plan: Outline the schedule for taking your business from the planning stage to opening your doors.
For established businesses the executive summary typically includes information about achievements, growth plans, etc.
A typical executive summary outline for an established business includes:
- Mission Statement: Articulates the purpose of your business. In a few sentences describe what your company does and your core values and business philosophy.
- Company Information: Give a brief history of your company – describe your products and/or services, when and where it was formed, who the owners and key employees are, statistics such as the number of employees, business locations, etc.
- Business Highlights: Describe the evolution of the business – how it has grown, including year-over-year revenue increases, profitability, increases in market share, number of customers, etc.
- Financial Summary: If the purpose of updating the business plan is to seek additional financing for expansion, then give a brief financial summary.
- Future goals: Describe your goals for the business. If you are seeking financing explain how additional funding will be used to expand the business or otherwise increase profits.
Automatic text summarization, or just text summarization, is the process of creating a short and coherent version of a longer document. Text summarization is the process of distilling the most important information from a source (or sources) to produce an abridged version for a particular user (or users) and task (or tasks).
We (humans) are generally good at this type of task as it involves first understanding the meaning of the source document and then distilling the meaning and capturing salient details in the new description. As such, the goal of automatically creating summaries of text is to have the resulting summaries as good as those written by humans.
It is not enough to just generate words and phrases that capture the gist of the source document. The summary should be accurate and should read fluently as a new standalone document. Automatic text summarization is the task of producing a concise and fluent summary while preserving key information content and overall meaning.
Given errors resulting from speech recognition and the fact that spoken language is often less formal than written language, the most widely used method for single document text summarization, sentence extraction, cannot be directly applied to speech summarization. However, if systems exploit the additional information that can be derived from the speech signal and dialogue structure, extractive methods can be extended for spoken language and augmented by new methods that focus on extracting particular kinds of information and reformulating it appropriately.
Summarization Categories
There are two types of summarization techniques: extractive and abstractive. Extractive methods function by identifying the important sentences or excerpts from the text and reproducing them verbatim as part of the summary. No new text is generated; only the existing text is used in the summarization process. This differs from abstractive methods, which employ more powerful natural language processing techniques to interpret the text and generate a new summary text.
Basically, there are three fairly independent tasks which all summarizes perform, as listed below. In this article, we will look at different abstractive topic presentation approaches.
Construct an intermediate representation of the input text which expresses the main aspects of the text.
Score the sentences based on the representation.
Select a summary comprising of several sentences.
Topic Words
This method aims to identify words that describe the topic of the input document. There are two ways to compute the importance of a sentence: as
a function of the number of topic signatures it contains, or as the proportion of the topic signatures in the sentence. Both sentence scoring functions relate to the same topic representation; however, they might assign different scores to sentences. The first method may assign higher scores to longer sentences because they have more words. The second approach measures the density of the topic words.
