At the recent FP&A Trends Webinar, senior finance professionals from diverse backgrounds and experience shared their views on the subject of Skills of the Future and How to Build Best-in-Class FP&A Teams.
One of the largest privately owned companies in the world, Cargill’s FP&A journey started around 6 years ago. But, as the company’s Global Finance Director – Cocoa and Chocolate emphasises in a short video, this journey never really ends.
For anyone unfamiliar, a financial model is a tool used to reflect the economics of a business scenario that can be used to track, monitor, and predict a company's financial performance. Financial modelling is a critical skill for all finance professionals as it teaches them the business and the critical business cause-and-effect drivers.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The origin of this sentence can be traced to Theodore Parker who was a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810. Parker called for the abolition of slavery in the USA in an 1853 collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion”.
So, what does this have to do with the mission of the Profitability Center of Excellence (PACE)? Plenty.
The top 7 trends shaping FP&A today can be grouped into 3 key building blocks: Process, Technology, and People.
The building blocks are a 3-part recipe to create the perfect cake. Each part will help to curate a strong finance professional and a successful cross-functional FP&A team.
xP&A is more than an attempt to ‘fix’ the planning process. It is a complete transformation of the FP&A function to continually challenge the status quo, to educate, shape and influence management decisions on how the organization achieves its goals.