In his 26-minute presentation, Paul Ashley Head of Applications, Lloyds Development Capital Limited, explained how the company has successfully implemented a digitised approach to business partnering, financial forecasting, and the private equity valuation process. 

Explaining and forecasting activity evolutions require to isolate correctly different factors (variables) that have an impact such as quantity, price, customer win/loss, competition. In the international environment, currencies and currency variances are one of the important variables.

Strategic planning is mostly done with qualitative analysis. In this article, we will explore the use of quantitative tools, how to narrow down the number of variables to focus on and what tools can help with managing multiple scenarios.  

Financial models are crucial to the business but building them in Excel can be both complicated and frustrating. Setting up formulas and stipulating conditions takes time. And just when you think your model is water-tight, there is another error.

This pandemic has uncovered several shortcomings in our way of planning, managing, and organizing societies and businesses. Now that the future looks predictably uncertain, there is a dire need to understand, react to, and learn from it and other unexpected events. 

As long as there are humans involved in making a forecast, the forecast will be biased. But there are some steps to make a forecast unbiased. This article will look into the unbiased forecasting framework and will explore the methods where humans have minimal influence on the outcome.