The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Enhance Your Budgeting with Four Steps
July 30, 2018
Budgeting can be a monotonous task, but it is necessary for business success. There are four steps that can enhance your budgeting process: Tie your budget to your strategic plan, tie it to the rolling forecast, minimize the iterations, and recognize the “80/20.” By tying in the budget with the strategic plan and rolling forecast, FP&A professionals can not only keep their budget at the forefront of their planning, but they are also continuously checking in and have the ability to tweak it as necessary. Minimizing iterations diminishes a lot of unnecessary work and recognizing the “80/20” helps to spread the analysis over the full calendar year and can take pressure off the budget season.
Does Your Company Need a Data Translator?
July 26, 2018
“Translating analytics into a language that decision makers understand is not as simple as it sounds. Among other things, the person doing the translating — whether it’s a quant or a data translator serving as a liaison between the quant and an executive decision maker — needs to avoid what’s referred to as data hubris. A data hubris is described as “the often implicit assumption that big data are a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, traditional data collection and analysis.” Bridging the cultural gap between domain specialists and analytics specialists within organizations with an interpretation function performed by a data translator can begin to address the disparity between the claims for big data and its reality.”
Read More at The Sloan Review >
CFOs Must Focus on Data Integrity Before Analytics
July 25, 2018
After all of the changes that finance has gone through due to new technologies and digitization, it is no surprise that CFOs’ priorities are changing. The main objective they are focusing on this year is supporting the enterprise’s need for information and analytics by maintaining a competitive cost structure. Without a strong foundation of consistent data definitions and processes for how data is stored or changed, there is no guarantee of data integrity. Without data integrity, finance cannot trust the outcomes of analytics solutions, no matter how sophisticated they are. This has finance leaders asking the question, ‘How will finance teams have the time to spend analyzing all the data spit out by business units and provide options and guidance to management based on it?”
Product Market Competition Isn’t Just About Pricing Anymore
July 24, 2018
For the previous generation of finance leaders, business used to be pretty straightforward, which meant their job was much less complex – a company would make something and sell it. Today, very few companies are competing on price alone, and everybody wants to move up the value chain. Organizations must now be delivering service along with products and anticipating customer needs as they arise. Knowing how to look ahead and plan well is much more important than it ever used to be. The impact on financial and non-financial KPIs, as well as the extended digital ecosystem, requires a different type of planning with real-time, dynamic data and predictive analytics capabilities. Some of this intelligence will come from people and some from your systems. But none of it should come from static, outdated data – at least not if you’re going to plan effectively.
Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >
