The role of planning is to help manage what can be controlled (i.e. the organisation’s business processes, the resources it applies to those processes, and the volume and quality of work done in those processes) to produce outcomes that will achieve organisational objectives, within an uncontrollable and unknowable external environment.

In this blog we will look at the components of a modern solution and why it matters. At the heart of every Analytic application is a mathematically based business model. This model describes the organisation in terms of its relationships between:

Organisations operate in an uncontrollable and often unpredictable business environment, such as market demand, energy, inflation and exchange rates. As a consequence, the role of planning is to help manage what can be controlled to produce outcomes that will achieve organisational objectives, within an uncontrollable and unknowable external environment.

Spreadsheets are without doubt the ‘killer’ application that turned the PC into an indispensable business tool. Before then, computing was the preserve of geeks and specialists who spoke in a language few accountants could understand as they served expensive, inaccessible machines locked away in their own air-conditioned environment.

Analytic models are rarely static. Their aim is to model the organisation in such a way as to allow managers to investigate what is actually going on and to assess changes to the way it operates.

In July 2017, I presented at the 2017 AICPA FP&A Conference in Las Vegas over AI (Artificial Intelligence) & machine Learning impact on FP&A. The session received great feedback from attendees and other speakers. So, I wanted to share an article summarizing the presentations main points. The goal of this article is to provide insights into the impact AI & machine learning will have on people, processes and technologies in FP&A. Hope you enjoy!