Irrespective of the industry you work in, I am sure all of you would have noticed a huge change in the way your business operates in the last decade. You may have seen competition from previously unforeseen competitors, your CIOs talking about new digital ways of doing business and the utter lack of ready talent in your teams to manage this new challenge.

Improving financial planning and analysis (FP&A) means investing in people and systems. It only takes three pages to design a process and identify new roles and responsibilities. This method is described in this article and has been used to introduce new financial processes and operational reports.

FP&A teams are skilled at pulling data from various information systems, manipulating it, and gathering insights. Although FP&A plays a crucial role in supporting companies in becoming more intelligent, there is a lot to think about when getting ready for big data and the FP&A transformation journey. Below are a few things to consider. This list will continue to evolve as we all learn from each other. 

 At a time when the FP&A framework is being extended to the entire organisation (into Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A)), FP&A Business Partnering need to keep up with this new model to stay relevant and cutting edge. xP&A Business Partnering is now the latest trend that is going well beyond just Finance involving the entire organisation to move FP&A and planning to the next level.

In today’s world, companies need more than ever fast insights to make the appropriate critical moves. Unfortunately, current BI tools through dashboards report ‘what’ happened and does not help to understand the ‘why’.

Changing consumer behaviours, supply chain shifts, and innovations in data analytics have pushed FP&A professionals to reconsider their approach to revenue planning processes. Those processes are both strategic and operational and require complete visibility on all data and drivers.