On 14th March 2017 the second meeting of the Amsterdam FP&A Board, launched in October 2016, took place in the Michael Page Office in World Trade Centre, Amsterdam. It gathered over 30 financial planning and analysis (FP&A) practitioners from such companies as ABN AMRO N.V., AkzoNobel, Cargill, Danone, Genpact, Microsoft Netherlands, T-Mobile, to name but a few. As the mission of the International FP&A Board is to guide the development and promotion of best practices in global FP&A, identify and support new trends, skillsets and innovations, FP&A Analytical Transformation became the primary focus of the discussion in Amsterdam.
The event was sponsored by Tagetik, the market leader in corporate performance management solutions, Page Group, one of the world’s best-known and most respected recruitment consultancies, and the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), the provider of the international FP&A Certification.
The second FP&A Board meeting in Amsterdam was designed to tackle one of the biggest challenges - Analytical Maturity of FP&A. Firstly, the FP&A Board discussed the concept of Advanced Analytics for FP&A. Then we moved on to FP&A Analytics Maturity Model paying close attention to its advanced and leading stages and the transformation the FP&A analytics has to undergo to evolve.
Figure 1: Thomas Lundell presents his case study
As one of the methods of the FP&A Board work is looking into practical case studies, Thomas Lundell, Director of FP&A and Business Control (EMEA) at NetApp, presented NetApp case study "FP&A Transformation: Becoming Agile, Adaptable and Predictive". He not only generously shared his solid experience in transforming FP&A Operating Model but also engaged the participants to group work on applying the suggested cutting-edge approach to fine-tuning and enhancement of their current FP&A Operating Models. The main conclusion of the discussion was that FP&A Transformation goes far beyond the Analytics itself involving People, Process, Technology, Business Partnering as shown in the figure below.
Figure 2
The discussion and networking part of the meeting was very productive. The members enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with each other and discuss the latest FP&A trends and best practices as well as being a part of our global FP&A community.
Stay in touch with our global FP&A community through the FP&A Club LinkedIn Group and the FP&A Trends resource. Please feel free to join and contribute to the discussions, posts, and commentaries.
Figure 3: Amsterdam FP&A Board members
