Driving digital with financial planning operations
June 28, 2019
June 28, 2019
The Chief Financial Officer’s (CFO) role is changing—and changing at high speed. With a new emphasis on digital, CFOs find their focus is expanding to include building the digital enterprise.
Keeping up with core financial activities while looking well beyond their traditional scope is challenging for a CFO, but a strong Financial Planning and Analysis function can be the game changer. A robust Financial Planning and Analysis team can lead the digital finance function, freeing the CFO to get creative, deliver insight and guide the enterprise in realizing the power of its data.
In this revolution of the finance function, Financial Planning and Analysis is the front-line partner of the business and operates at the nucleus of the digital finance agenda.
To help realize this, the Financial Planning and Analysis function should transform itself, becoming the business’s front-line partner in navigating a digital finance agenda. It’s a challenging new role for the finance function. Getting there should take time and effort.
The first transformation steps involve making crucial operating model decisions—more challenging when one-size-fits-all is not an option. Each firm’s relative maturity, growth agenda, business complexity and technological capabilities can help define its unique Financial Planning and Analysis operating model.
To build a more proactive function, Financial Planning and Analysis can shift from its traditional backward-facing analysis to predictive analysis and approach that supports future business outcomes. Questions to ask include: What services, now and in the future, should this Financial Planning and Analysis function provide? What structure can effectively tap economies of scale while maintaining high service quality?
To back the CFO’s role as a strategic digital leader, digital talent is crucial. The Financial Planning and Analysis function needs highly skilled, knowledgeable, business-line-specific resources. By automating transactional tasks—or reallocating them to offshore or shared resources—Financial Planning and Analysis frees the team to focus on value-add analysis that can boost decision making across the function.
It won’t be enough, though, to build proficiency around today’s leading-edge activities, such as predictive analysis, scenario tracking and real-time influence on business performance. Anticipating tomorrow’s roles and skills is essential to help drive the business into the future. The time to cultivate or hire data scientists, scenario planners or Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategists is now.
Talent is essential, but—in a data-intensive function—technology is too. To deliver stronger insights and highly informed business decisions, tools and data should support real-time analytics. When choosing tools, it helps to consider the technology architecture’s full spectrum, from data management to cloud to visualization tools.
Several kinds of technology should comprise the technology ecosystem.
A new Financial Planning and Analysis operating model cannot be built overnight, but is worth the investment. Key considerations to keep in mind:
Ready to begin transforming your Financial Planning and Analysis function? Contact us to get started on your journey.