In mid-May, the International FP&A Board held two meetings in Switzerland: the 7th meeting in Geneva and the 6th one in Zurich. 

At both events, Board members were trying to find an answer to the following question: "Why Driver-Based Planning (DBP) matters for modern FP&A?"

Agenda

• Evolution of Driver-Based Planning.
• Driver-Based approach as a basis for predictive analytics.
• Driver-Based approach as a basis for effective Rolling Forecast and Scenario Planning.
• Evolution of Driver-Based Planning. Group work.
• Conclusions and recommendations.

Each meeting was attended by 30 senior finance practitioners from large international cooperations and local companies, including:

• Alcatel
• Coty
• Duracell
• Mondelez
• PepsiCo
• Swarovski
• Thomson Reuters
• and many others.

As was quoted by Nate Silver, "one of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening".  DBP is an essential tool in supporting your company's performance management in this incredible environment of constant change.

The Swiss boards were looking at the steps to DBP implementation and collaborated on the development of DBP Maturity Model. The discussion raised several questions:

• How to separate signals from noise in data?
• How to use the Pareto Principle in defining the 20 % of drivers for the 80% of the results?
• How to keep the DBP process "current"? 
• What is the role of AI/ML in that process? 
• How to manage this tremendous cultural shift? 

Our Sponsors

We are very grateful to  Michael Page / Page Executive and CCH® Tagetik for sponsoring the FP&A Boards in Geneva and Zurich.