Starting a business and sustaining one are two very different things that are both essential in their own way. Your accounting team handles the current data of your business while Financial Planning and Analysis enable your foresight and wisdom for what can be done ahead.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The origin of this sentence can be traced to Theodore Parker who was a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810. Parker called for the abolition of slavery in the USA in an 1853 collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion”.

So, what does this have to do with the mission of the Profitability Center of Excellence (PACE)? Plenty.

In this issue, you will find a CPM trend report; an article on emerging planning tools; a breakdown of the key success factors for the FP&A system implementation; a guide for improving user adoption; and a video case study on the use of predictive analytics and machine learning at Microsoft.

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So why are we as finance professionals so slow to adopt digital transformation when there are so many proven benefits to us and the companies we operate in? I believe this is due to three main fears.

Organisations that pursue Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) often cite three main reasons for doing so: limited resources, lack of ownership, and inaccurate budgets.

- But what solutions to these problems does ZBB offer?

- What steps need to be taken to ensure we implement it correctly, and what kind of results can we expect?

Find out in this new video from Dawn LaDuke, Vice President FP&A Global Supply Chain at Nature’s Bounty Co.

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After an absence of almost two years, I was looking forward to joining the London FP&A Board meeting, where a group of senior finance professionals met in person, many experiencing their first face-to-face industry event since the initial lockdown in the UK back in March 2020.

The top 7 trends shaping FP&A today can be grouped into 3 key building blocks: Process, Technology, and People.

The building blocks are a 3-part recipe to create the perfect cake. Each part will help to curate a strong finance professional and a successful cross-functional FP&A team.

The cloud holds some exciting prospects for the development of cash flow planning. It will bring access to Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics on a scale previously only accessible to data scientists.