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:

Advanced analytics is fast becoming a core enterprise competency. Organizations slow to develop it risk falling behind competitors. Companies need quick and reliable insight into the current and future performance of their processes as well as the evolving needs of customers. Advanced analytics is no longer the purview of companies like Google or Amazon. It’s a critical competitive differentiator.

According to Google's Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, "The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it— that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades."

To paraphrase the concept of Occam's razor, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex explanations. In a sense, the answer is in the question, "How do we make the complex easier to understand?" Keep the explanations simple.

We live in a Digital World today, with nearly everything interconnected with each other. Yet many individuals, companies and organisations seek their own ways and explore how to leverage data in the area of Financial Planning and Analysis.

Recent trends in FP&A have been to focus on data analytics and driver-based planning to provide better information for business leaders to make decisions. An often-overlooked challenge in transforming financial planning and analysis is the FP&A team’s structure and resource alignment. This article examines how we are transforming the people part of FP&A.