The State Planning System (SPS) is a flexible, policy-oriented management tool intended to help analyze possible impacts of various policy decisions. The SPS is able to address a wide range of issues because it depends on the user to provide the relationships and data to be used in the analysis. Such issues might include enrollment shifts among educational institutions, competition among state-funded services for scarce monies, and student/taxpayer share of higher education costs. Chapter II emphasizes SPS as a planning framework in which many sets of relationships or equations can be used. In Chapter III, a simple policy problem is examined as a way of describing the calculation capabilities of the SPS. Chapter IV describes the report preparation capability of the SPS and its ability to link to other reporting systems. Chapter V presents a summary of pilot-test case studies as examples of the kinds of questions that might be addressed in using the SPS as an impact calculator. Chapter VI reviews the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) implementation policy for the SPS. A glossary is included containing terms associated with the SPS. (Author/CMV)