Tokyo Launch: Latest Trends in FP&A

July 12, 2018

The International FP&A Board opened its 20th chapter in Tokyo, Japan, on the 12th of July. On the day, we had a full board (42 people) with senior representatives from leading local and international organizations in Japan, namely:

Akebono
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Sandoz
Takeda Pharmaceutical
TASAKI & Co. Ltd
Walmart
and many others.

Agenda

1. Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A). Key definitions and developments
2. Interactive discussion on the latest trends in analytics, planning, modelling and systems
3. A case study from the field.

"FP&A: New Steering Concept" by Rolf Wietlisbach-Kobayashi, Chief Financial Officer at DB Schenker

4. FP&A Analytics Maturity Model. Group work
5. Conclusions and recommendations

During the dynamic discussion, the needs for simplification and planning agility were highly emphasized. As was beautifully 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”. That is why Japanese organizations are looking at different ways to identify key external and internal drivers in the ocean of data for the planning purposes.

Some organizations started to explore AI/ML projects for FP&A as well.

The biggest challenges are traditional budgeting culture, quality of data, lack of analytical FP&A talent and lack of system investments.