The recent FP&A Board meeting brought together some strong leaders in the FP&A field to discuss key lessons learned from the pandemic and how the future is evolving for the FP&A function.
The pandemic has no doubt brought in unexpected challenges for the finance world. In this one-in-a-hundred-year event, companies have had to be nimble to adapt to a changing environment. When the pandemic started, people were confused if this would last just a couple of months or years. Planning and adapting to this uncertainty were the key themes of the discussion.
What was the biggest lesson learned from the Pandemic?
Some of the answers to this question revolved around forecasting, talent retention and leading with confidence from the finance team. Using past data to predict the future became extremely difficult in an environment where the baseline keeps changing every few months. Some of the discussions focused on how companies have had to adapt to new ways of forecasting to keep up to date. Some professionals face the challenge of retaining strong talent in a difficult financial environment. Offering furlough and re-hiring talent when market conditions improved was one way to retain a strong team.
A good example of strong financial leadership was the example of the mayor of New York at the height of the pandemic, and how his news conferences carried the grim truth about the situation and yet built public trust. As leaders of FP&A, we must project confidence to other teams to reduce panic and instil a sense of confidence that business is functioning normally, albeit in a challenging market. This can be done through transparency and projections that show a path forward through a difficult time.
Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A)
Moving beyond just finance and aligning with Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, and HR is the future. Both vertical and horizontal integration are needed across the teams. Finance can generate a plan, but that must take into consideration input from other teams. Company goals should be aligned across the organisation. There was some discussion around successful best practices in this area at the forum.
FP&A Board has been conducting Survey on actual time distribution on low, medium, and high priority tasks vs. desired time spent on each area. The survey has repeatedly shown that more time is spent on low-priority required tasks than what FP&A professionals would like to and hence comes in the transformation process. Leveraging BPM, CRM and HCM tools can allow quicker execution of everyday tasks and leave more time for strategic high, priority tasks.
The event concluded with a networking session, giving attendees and organisers the chance to personally connect and discuss in more detail some of the topics raised during the presentation.
The meeting was sponsored by SAP and the International Workplace Group. A special thank you to Fernando Schreiner for moderating the event.
