A recent Accenture study showed that 79% of large company executives think that companies that don’t manage big data properly will get left behind. But, data alone is not what businesses are after. They’re after what they think data can do for them. They’re really after the insights they can glean from data that will help them improve their decision making and the actions they take to move their businesses forward.

In the first FP&A Board Connect, Takeshi Murakami, Business Manager to CEO/President at Microsoft Japan, a speaker of the second Tokyo FP&A Board, explains how Microsoft achieved remarkable results by using predictive analytics and machine learning in FP&A.

In this article, I would like to share some insights on why your FP&A analytical transformation might fail and how to avoid this. The article is based on more than 20 years of relevant experience transforming large organizations.

Traditional forecasts and plans typically use single-point estimates and metrics with little or no discussion of risks & opportunities (R&O), and without showing correlations among multiple R&O that could have a major impact on performance. R&O adjusted forecasting and planning is an approach to forecasting that generates a range of possible outcomes and probabilities based on an analysis of multiple variables of R&O.

The sixth FP&A Board Connect will be delivered from Kuala Lumpur. It is dedicated to the subject of "FP&A Analytical Transformation: AXA Group (India) Case Study".

A lockdown is a challenging experience for all of us and we, at FP&A Trends, would like to make our digest as useful as possible for you. Therefore, we have divided this digest into three parts, allowing you to choose the most effective way to learn and grow while staying at home.

The world has changed in so many ways since the last Brexometer on 11th March.  There have been millions of Coronavirus cases and more than a hundred thousand deaths, with almost every human on the planet affected in their daily lives.  The impact on business has been nothing less than catastrophic. Whole sectors have come to a grinding halt, across all countries and economies.

The image of a silo is one that is sealed off from its surroundings. It is insular and protected. In the organisation, this has tended to manifest itself in functional silos. Meaning Finance, HR, IT, R&D, Supply Chain, Marketing etc. It can, of course, apply broader to also divisions within an organisation or even regions / markets. How does this relate to Finance?

This is the second article in a series of articles devoted to the wide variety of the benefits provided by the next generation budget, the operational budget (OB), and its associated operational income statement (OIS). This article will describe OB’s benefits over the current budgeting process and its results. It will be of particular interest to FP&A professionals focused on the current budgeting process and how to improve it. 

“If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.”

For FP&A professionals the box is budgets.