The second FP&A Board in New York gathered in a beautiful Michael Page office in upper Manhattan to continue our global Rolling Forecast (RF) Discussions.

Meeting Agenda

• Rolling Forecast: main definitions, advantages, and disadvantages
• Rolling Forecast: 7 factors for successful implementation
• Beyond Budgeting and Rolling Forecast
• Case study by Richard Melia, Finance Director at QuintilesIMS
• Three Stages of Rolling Forecast Maturity. Group work
• Conclusions and recommendations

20 senior finance professionals exchanged their knowledge and expertise. Richard Melia, Finance Director at QuintilesIMS, shared his insights on how QuintilesIMS aligned financial forecasts with business operations.

Combining their professional experience, the Board members came to several conclusions regarding the subject:

• Business Culture should be ready for Rolling Forecast (RF) Philosophy
• Defining key business drivers from the sea of data is one of the challenges for successful Rolling Forecast
• Collaboration with business is essential. FP&A leads the RF talks as an educator and a business partner
• Good FP&A technology is essential
• Data quality is a big challenge
• Business intelligence drives the change and the quality
• Traditional "accounting period" forecast has many limitations comparing to RF
• RF should be analytical and not-emotional
• RF is a good "baseline" for the next year budget. The initiatives and new projects should be modeled separately
• We are not ready to abandon the budget yet. The main reasons are bonuses and the need for investor communication 
• RF is a valuable tool if it is implemented properly: through the driver-based model and agile system

Our Sponsors

We are very grateful to all the participants for their passion and to our global partners Michael Page and CCH Tagetik for their great support!