An INSEAD MBA and entrepreneur Thorsteinn has over 20 years of experience in management, consulting and training. He is chairman of Ultima BV, a company specialized in developing driver-based planning and budgeting solutions. He also runs his own consultancy with a focus on improving business performance, using the Beyond Budgeting approach to planning and budgeting, and the Logical Thinking Process methodology for strategy formulation and improvement programs, both in consulting assignments and corporate training. Thorsteinn is a member of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable and a certified expert in The Logical Thinking Process. The Logical Thinking Process was originally developed by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, author of bestselling business novel „The Goal“ and pioneer of modern production and process management, as a method to improve decision making in the corporate environment. The purpose of the Logical Thinking Process is to help people make better use of logic and the methods of the natural sciences to analyze complicated situations and formulate strategy.
How many people in your organization love the annual budgeting process? Probably none. The mere mention of the word "budget" raises eyebrows and evokes cynicism.
Many believe that one of the future roles of Finance, and FP&A, specifically, will be to provide real-time, data-driven decision support for the business. This will transform Finance from a mere ‘cost center’ to a ‘profit center’ function, raising its importance within the organization.
This is the second part of a three-part series that focuses on the business value that data science & analytics can provide to enterprises.
Strategic investment decision-making involves the process of identifying, evaluating and selecting among projects that are likely to have significant impact on the organization competitive advantage. More specifically, the decision will influence what the organization does, where it does and how it does it.
Over the twenty years that I have worked with Beyond Budgeting, I have asked tens of thousands of managers and Finance people all over the world about how satisfied they are with the budgeting process.