“Telling the story” is one of the most important parts of the FP&A role, and data visualisation can help immensely. This makes the FP&A dashboard a very powerful tool, but 80% of dashboards are seldom or never used.

Providing decision support on product offerings in an online marketplaces environment requires digging deep on the granularity of the key business drivers to evaluate success. Using a method called “A/B testing” allows an FP&A leader to easily build a framework on key criteria to better understand the various behavioural impacts that consumers apply in different scenarios and to analyse their performance.

A key function of effective FP&A is to create a data-driven decision-making culture throughout the enterprise. Data management is, therefore, a crucial part of FP&A's agenda. 

In an ever-changing environment, dynamic and data-driven Scenario Planning is of critical importance. That means moving from traditional methods to an agile FP&A process, which can help organisations to navigate successfully through uncertainty.

Cultural change on FP&A is inevitable. As the world evolves, our cultural norms on business evolve too. The best way is to catch up with the speed of this daily evolving change is through scientific thinking. Now for our profession, data is the lowest meaningful element, such as an atom in a living organism. The advantage will favour the teams who will understand that indisputable fact and, we will witness the process closely in the future.
 

As technology keeps advancing, digitalising the FP&A function and integrating it across the organisation is not out of the reach for any company. The successful companies of tomorrow will thrive by implementing data-driven and digital planning processes.