SWTCH by Pigment
Three days of predictions, insights, and advice from leaders in finance, sales, HR, supply chain and more
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SWTCH by Pigment
Three days of predictions, insights, and advice from leaders in finance, sales, HR, supply chain and more
Register now here
By Ernie Humphrey, CEO at Treasury Careers
2017 budgets might be locked and loaded at your company, but that does not mean that they need to be anchors on your company’s ability to anticipate, respond and react effectively to dynamic market conditions in 2017. Companies all sizes are upgrading from Excel and all its related headaches to leverage cost-effective cloud-based budgeting and planning solutions that fuel business agility by allowing companies to implement driver-based planning and forecasting.
Companies that implement driver-based planning have finance organizations that deliver strategic value by acting as trusted advisors across departmental lines, identifying potential pitfalls and new opportunities, and providing senior management with a dynamic financial plan that informs better decisions across the enterprise.
“The budgeting process at most companies has to be the most ineffective practice in management…it hides opportunity and stunts growth…In fact when companies win, in most cases it is despite their budgets, not because of them.” - Jack Welch, from the book “Winning”. Effective budgeting comes with an understanding of its key objectives by everyone involved in the process. In the vein of the philosophy of KIS (keep it simple) the main objectives of budgeting can be characterized as follows:
In terms of navigating the journey from non-value add budgeting to budgeting that delivers strategic value and planning the first step is mitigating and/or eliminating inherent barriers to effective budgeting framed in terms of people, process and technology:
People
Process
Technology
In term of budgeting and planning, it is not uncommon for people to use these terms interchangeably as times which cam be a bit dangerous. So, before a discussion of driver-based planning the following will be helpful:
Just as in budgeting, financial planning and analysis here are inherent challenges that can be mitigated and/or erased before investments in people and technology are made to optimize the strategic delivered by the FP&A function.
According to the Aberdeen Group in a February 2016 study, the top challenges companies face in FP&A are as follows:
The same framework in terms of people, process, and technology discussed above can be used above to set the stage for a successful journey from static budgeting and planning to driver-based planning.
Driver-based planning focuses on identifying and modeling the relationships that key factors have company value At a more micro-level, companies endeavor to create the right incentives for employee behaviors which impact value drivers (as measured and monitored by KPIs and their relationships to these value drivers) that impact company value. Is the spirit of keeping it simple, driver-based budgeting and planning in a nutshell:
In terms of identifying measuring drivers of company value "that matter":
I will outline a quick example of key drivers of company value and building relationships to key KPIs as I believe more and more companies will find that the drivers used (or a subset of them) will become the "norm" over the next 5-10 years.
The following represent key drivers of company value according to a survey by the CIMA, The Digital Imperative: Measure and Manage What’s Next:
Also courtesy of the aforementioned CIMS study:
In terms of key success factors for successful driver-based planning I offer the following:
The key benefits of driver-based planning include:
In terms of the functionality of what a cloud-based budgeting, planning and forecasting solution looks life I can suggest the following characteristics:
In closing, I offer 4 key takeaways:
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