Planners and managers in supply chain organizations are accustomed to using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as their best (and sometimes only) answer to measuring forecast accuracy. It is so ubiquitous that it is hardly questioned.

During the recent years, the level of detail and precision which financial modeling in the business world has pursued has been elevated. Learning Excel, a widely used and accepted computer application is one essential skill required of a strong financial modeler. But these days, the business world requires more. This article addresses those needs.

Are FP&A teams empowered to deliver strategic value across the enterprise? I partnered with FP&A thought leaders Larysa Melnychuk, and James Myers to develop the FP&A Empowerment: The Evolution of Technology & Trends survey in part to find out if this perception is a reality. More than 300 global FP&A leaders took part at the survey.This article shares the key findings and conclusions.

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.

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.