Building an analytically led organisation, focused on bending the cost curve and reinvesting those savings into opportunities that are earlier on the product lifecycle are key steps to growing and sustaining shareholder value. No company will continue to grow forever. In order to stick around, you’ll need to one day start to bend the cost curve.
If the last year has taught us anything, traditional financial planning and analysis approaches did not work (or at least proved suboptimal) when navigating through uncharted landscapes. The pandemic forced FP&A practitioners to reassess and adapt our approach to planning, forecasting, and bringing to the forefront the importance of scenario planning.
Annual Operating Planning is an important activity in many organisations. Some refer to it as budget season and every organisation has its own nomenclature such as AOP, OB, LRBP, etc. This article covers best practices for a successful planning season, explains what best-in-class organisations do to create a solid annual operating plan and answers three burning questions.
Analysis is only as good as the decisions that result from it. In the uncertain business environment, organisations that provide people with the intelligence to make better decisions will outperform their competitors.
CEOs that are more strategically oriented and less numbers-oriented tend to want to partner with a CFO who has a strong command of the numbers. When that's not the case, and we have CEOs or leadership teams that are focused on their matrix, it can be challenging for the finance organisation. In the new article, Joao Almeida and Rich Feldman discuss some of the current challenges facing leaders in finance, and the role of capital planning in a time of increased uncertainty.
The financial numbers only show one side of the story. When FP&A professionals are presenting the complete story behind the numbers, soft data needs to be collected and incorporated. The big question is, what data and where is it?