The Ledger

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 >

Connecting the Dots Between Manufacturing Data and Insight

Today’s manufacturers have more quality data at their fingertips than ever before. Companies are now leveraging tools to collect extensive amounts of data about their production processes—across multiple lines and sites, around the clock. Real-time data quality is key to plant-floor operators because it enables them to spot manufacturing issues and inconsistencies before they magnify, make timely corrections, and determine where to focus process improvement efforts at the plant and enterprise levels. To effectively sift through the amount of data coming from the modern plant floor and find real, valuable quality intelligence, there are essential pillars that manufacturers first need to have in place: standardization, centralized data, and prioritization.

Read More at Manufacturing.Net >

The Digital Finance Advantage

The Hackett Group’s 2019 Key Issues Study revealed that cost reduction was finance’s top improvement priority for this year. The study found that finance leaders expect digital transformation will have a dramatic impact on their performance, their operating models, and their skills and role definitions in the next two to three years. Cost optimization is a huge driver of finance shifting to digital. Digitalization can have a major effect on finance organizations by significantly reducing costs and increasing efficiency. By taking advantage of digital tools, finance leaders can match the efficiency levels of today’s world-class finance functions.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

The Total Cost of Effective Budgeting and Forecasting

Plans, budgets, and forecasts can be some of the most valuable contributions that finance makes to the business. Ideally, they help organizations know what’s coming down the road and remain agile enough to respond to uncertainty and to keep the business moving forward. The goal of these processes is to produce planning, budgeting, and forecasting that help provide guidance and decision-making support for the business. The key consideration is not necessarily how much organizations are spending on the process, but instead whether organizations are making better decisions. When FP&A plays a strong business partnering role and is in frequent conversations with the business, the challenges, opportunities, and pain points of plans, budgets, and forecasts become visible quickly.

Read More at CFO Magazine >