Modern FP&A Leaders Need to Upgrade Their Playbook

“In a world of digital transformation and constant disruption, analysis must keep pace with queries that will change midstream and anticipate questions that have yet to be asked, but should be.”

 The ability to turn around insightful analysis in a timely manner is key to being seen as a modern business. To remain competitive, mature reporting processes must become more of a comprehensive playbook that provides decision makers with actionable insight in real-time. More mature processes rely less on spreadsheets, and favor purpose-built FP&A solutions that provide access to common databases, manage data scenarios and related workflows, and ensure transparency. Immature financial planning capabilities often resemble a shadow budget process, with simplistic reports, scarce analytics and a lack of business-value insights. When it comes to business planning, level of detail used must be appropriate to test a hypothesis “what if” in a way that has business relevance. Successful FP&A organizations often have the ability to provide faster and more predictive analytics, adjustments on the fly, and an emphasis on high performance through leveraging advanced analytics.

Read More at Smarter with Gartner >

Resolving Common Manufacturing Challenges with Process Optimization

To continually grow as they has in the past, discrete manufacturers must deal with some unique challenges. Without a robust and integrated modeling platform, they often struggle with lack of business visibility, little to no access to actionable insight, excess inventory, and declining profits. The lack of innovation in the business process and technology aspects of manufacturing has many businesses heading into a downward spiral. Consequently, competitors that continue to meet customer needs are the ones that will succeed, both now and in the long term. Short-term vision and planning can mean long-term failure or stagnating growth. Customer demand on organizations to demonstrate flexibility and continue to meet their requirements – but with more product variations – is now the reality of today’s discrete manufacturing industry.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Profitability Analytics: A New Perspective on FP&A

FP&A  professionals are all generally focused on two things: (1) examining current performance and the immediate past for lessons learned and changes to replicate positive performance or change negative performance and (2) making projections and planning for the future with forward-looking scenarios, analyzing risks and opportunities, and mapping possible responses.

Advances in digital technologies increase the potential for businesses to use powerful tools to improve and expand their FP&A function. Modern organizations need a robust definition of their FP&A practices that will support the entire organization, looking well beyond finance and accounting’s traditional scope and embracing all the value creation and performance goals throughout an organization. Profitability analytics enables FP&A leaders to understand the past while focusing on developing areas of nonfinancial and financial data analytics and modeling that causally support building robust forward-looking scenarios and analyses.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >

Strategic Planning in Today’s Volatile Business Climate

“If there’s a single theme informing the C-suite’s most pressing challenges today, it’s the unrelenting pace and scale of change.”

Businesses are facing the harsh reality that their traditional approach to finance planning is not up to the challenge of establishing assumptions, defining objectives, and allocating resources over a specific span of time. In addition to grappling with a constantly shifting business, technology, and social landscape, today’s strategists must confront more complex planning variables than ever before, while the diversity and scope of their decisions has also grown.  No one can predict the future, but today’s leaders can help shape it by understanding the long trajectories that connect it to the past. Rather than be indecisive in the face of uncertainty, leaders can consider multiple possible future scenarios and plan their next steps accordingly. By doing so, they can help to build a more dynamic and scalable business overall.

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >