Tokyo FP&A Board meeting was held on the 27th June 2019, and a lot of financial professionals got together to talk about “FP&A Analytical Transformation”, the main theme of the night.
The crux of the analytics movement is making better decisions and more organizations are moving towards a data-driven culture, but only about a third of organizations surveyed said they would describe their current culture as data-driven. So, where is the disconnect?
Where is your finance team on the analytics maturity curve? Is finance in your organization providing prescriptive analytics to help steer the business? Is your financial planning and analysis team use artificial intelligence or machine learning to improve forecast accuracy? These are just a few of the many topics we discussed at the recent FP&A Board meeting in Toronto.
4-5 years ago in Microsoft, Cloud business was a small portion of the overall business, but now is the key business for the company, with new and diverse purchase options like subscription model on office 365, pay as you go model on Azure cloud platform... boosting and creating an avalanche of data every day.
In Part 1 of this article, we explained the data challenges faced by FP&A as well as how the expectations of the FP&A user community has evolved through the generations. In this article, we will explain how the boundaries have changed and the implementation framework.
Any activity or business process executed in the various departments across the enterprise has an impact on the financials. At a macro level, the interaction of the Finance organization with the rest of the enterprise can be bucketed into three categories: