improve and shorten your planning cycleimprove and shorten your planning cycle. 3. while there is no...

IMPROVE AND SHORTEN YOUR PLANNING CYCLESix Techniques for Optimizing Your Budgeting & Forecasting Process

by Tony Ard

2 Improve and Shorten Your Planning Cycle

Introduction

The New Strategic Role of FinanceIt is both a challenging and exciting time to be in finance.

Financial planning is no longer a simple financial

forecasting exercise; instead, it has evolved into a more

integrated financial and operational planning activity that

touches the entire organization. And given today’s dynamic

business environment, these plans are constantly

changing. To stay competitive, organizations must be

nimble and flexible, re-evaluating plans on an on-going

basis to address emerging opportunities and threats.

Finance leaders, in particular, are under more pressure

than ever to find better ways to support their core businesses by managing uncertainty, volatility and risk.

In this shifting paradigm, it isn’t surprising that so many organizations struggle with strategy execution – the

process of translating strategy into actionable and

measurable operational initiatives. Finance teams must

shift time away from tedious data aggregation functions

and spend more of it delivering value-added analysis,

identifying trends and using analytics to advise business

decisions that impact profitability. The volume and

complexity of the financial and operational data that

Finance must manage contributes to the increasing

sophistication of models needed for strategic planning.

So, how should we spend our time? According to a number

of studies, the average finance professional today spends

40 percent of their time collecting and compiling data, 25

percent maintaining spreadsheets, 20 percent creating

reports and 15 percent doing analysis and other activities.

The best organizations look very different. They spend 10

percent of their time collecting data, and 30 percent doing

analysis – yes only 30 percent. High-performing finance

organizations move from analysis to a rich interaction with

decision-makers, discussing what the analysis means.

“What are the alternate scenarios we should focus on?”

“What are the tradeoffs?” The best finance professionals

tend to spend a great deal of time with the people and

functions they’re supporting – as much as 40 percent. They

truly become a trusted advisor facilitating the decisions that

the organization should be making – focusing on

operational information combined with financial data.

Improve and Shorten Your Planning Cycle 3

While there is no question that budgeting & forecasting will

remain a core function of finance, it is critical to integrate

the process to broader organizational initiatives in a more

flexible and seamless manner. Budgeting should be

considered an ongoing and key component of a broad

performance management process within the organization.

The performance management process consists of the

repeatable steps that are necessary to strategize, plan,

monitor and analyze such that business professionals can

both plan and execute in accordance with company goals.

Unsuccessful performance management projects can often

be linked to a failure to document the process inclusive of

its deliverables. When departments are aligned and the

desired process is understood, technology can be applied

to complete the picture.

This paper is designed to give you actionable insight to

overcome some of the biggest hurdles to implementing an

effective planning process whether it be long-range

strategic planning, an annual budget or a rolling forecast

(below). The end goal is to not only implement a best

practice planning solution, but also to help you succeed as

a trusted advisor to the entire organization in order to drive

improved performance.

Proven Methodologies That WorkBest practices are often advertised as “silver bullets”. As

Finance teams look to re-engineer inefficient and ineffective

budgeting and planning methodologies and tools, they

realize that one approach can’t be right for every

organization. In reality, a ‘best practice’ planning

methodology can’t really be hard-wired, and an optimal process is often a function of an organization's culture or

even the competitiveness of their market. However, from

our work partnering with clients, partners and industry

thought leaders over the past 20+ years, there are certainly

some common methodologies that have repeatedly

emerged as critical for enabling a modern, flexible and

efficient budgeting and forecasting process.

Realizing the Benefits of Performance Management

For many finance professionals, the annual budgeting

process is an all-consuming process that is often outdated

within months (if not weeks) of being finalized. There are few

who relish the experience, as it is often characterized by

long hours and vast differences between what executive

management wants and line management can deliver in

terms of future financial performance. In 2012, we asked

100 Finance personnel across the country a series of

questions about their planning process. One of them, “How

long does it take?” yielded a surprising result: more than 88% of respondents take at least one full business quarter

to plan their budget for the upcoming year.

Align rolling forecasts, multi-year plans, and detailed budgets

2.

3.

Embrace ‘What-If’ Scenario Modeling – adopting a

scenario-based approach to planning can greatly

enhance the business management process for most

organizations - whether conducting sensitivity analysis

focusing on a key driver of the business or building

more advanced, multivariate or initiative-based

scenarios.

Forecast on a “Rolling” Basis – many leading edge

companies are moving to a rolling forecast model with

flexible budgets and event-driven planning. Actual and

monthly projections for “rolling” 12-18 month periods

provide a trended view of performance, typically

represented at an entity level. The model helps assess

current realities that will influence longer-range (multi-

year) projections, as well as detailed operational plans.

1. Adopt a Driver-Based Planning Approach – driver-based and history-driven logic can help to seed the

plan mathematically in alignment with corporate goals

(e.g. growth factors) greatly reducing the amount of

input required by a planner and ultimately helping to

automate and shorten annual budgeting cycles.

4.

6.

5.

Deploy Initiative Based Planning & Tracking – establish

owners, milestones, budgets and achievement goals

for critical initiatives. Streamline the process of

identifying, reviewing and approving new initiatives

and ensure project owners and contributors identify

budget variances, highlight benefit achievement, and

capture comments at any level. With workflow

integrated in to the process, key stakeholders across

management levels have complete visibility into the

performance of various initiatives, improving

organizational alignment.

Tie Operational Reporting to Strategic Objectives –

effective financial performance reporting should be

role-based giving each decision maker visibility into

KPIs and metrics in context of their individual domains.

Scorecards and interactive dashboards that provide

automated alerts and notifications as well as a

feedback loop to capture explanations and

commentary helps ensure all stakeholders have

visibility and accountability. The ability to perform

efficient ‘drill-through’ analysis to underlying details

can guide and direct corrective action.

Streamline and Automate Data Collection – improve

the integration of both financial and operational

information by automating data feeds, including

manual data collection activities into a single data

store so that all planning and reporting is based on the

same metadata and ETL process enabling the delivery

of consistent, trusted information.

Here are 6 budgeting best practices that we believe are

applicable to the majority of medium to large sized

organizations across industries:


2.

3.

1.

4.

5.

6.

Adopt a Driver-Based Planning Approach

Embrace "What-If" Scenario Modeling

Forecast on a "Rolling" Basis

Deploy Initiative Based Planning & Tracking

Streamline and Automate Data Collection

Tie Operational Reporting to Strategic Objectives

Optimize the Planning Process: 6 Proven Techniques

Now, let's take a look at each of these areas in more depth.

1. Adopt a Driver-Based Planning Approach

For some time thought leaders in the performance

management domain have been espousing the virtues of

building financial models that incorporate operational data

or drivers. Financials, as we know, are outcomes. And while

they are certainly of vital importance – the ultimate score, if

you will –they are by nature lagging indicators focusing on

past performance. The activities or drivers that generate

financial outcomes must be identified in order to

understand and model the enterprise. They are, in modeling

terms, the independent or predictor variables – the main

causal factors that should be highlighted and leveraged in

planning models.

This assumption was recently validated by a survey we

conducted with the FP&A departments of 100+

organizations where >60% of respondents cited

operational drivers as a key component to their model. We

have encouraged our own customers to import data

sources beyond the general ledger into the Axiom EPM

platform and to work with us to construct models that link

operational data with financials. In healthcare, that typically

means including all in-patient and out-patient statistics –

healthcare revenue and numerous expense line items are

directly tied to these statistics. In banking, interest income

is really a function of balances and yields. Yields are a

function of the general level of interest rates, spreads to

those rates and the relationship between what is being paid

down from prior periods and what is being originated in the

current and forecast periods. Even simple unit pricing and

unit volume statistics can be useful for modeling revenue

streams.

3. They enable planners to evaluate alternative scenarios.

No one knows the future, but a well-constructed driver-

based model enables planners to understand and

model the sensitivity to key assumptions. Our

recommendation to clients: don’t take a single set of

numbers to your executives and board. Present several

scenarios (perhaps anchored around a base case),

educating the executive team and the board about the

sensitivity to key assumptions. It is one of the great

value-added services you can provide to your

organization.

4. They will increase the predictive accuracy of your

forecasts and models. Once drivers are collected and

incorporated into the business logic of your budget or

forecast, one can back-test and tune the logic based

on actual experience, improving the predictive quality

of your planning model through time.

4 key benefits of operational drivers

The benefits of incorporating operational drivers are

significant:

1. They enable organizations to design models that focuson the leading versus lagging indicators. Too oftenbudget systems are constructed by keying in financialoutcomes with no real insight into how those outcomes

will be achieved.

2. They provide much greater insight into what’s actually

going on in the organization. “Revenue was below plan

due to lower sales volumes and deeper discounting

than expected.” In this example, the plan had

assumptions about sales volumes and avg. discount.

All plan/actual reports can and should include not only

financial variances, but operational variances as well.

Establishing the proper statistical relationships to adjust

drivers to “flex” volume, workload, revenue and

departmental plans is essential to efficient planning. Assumptions related to global volumes, reimbursement

rates, inflation factors, labor rates and efficiency targets

should all cascade down to “flex” revenue and expense

plans. Driver-based and history-driven logic can help to

seed the plan mathematically in alignment with

corporate goals (e.g. growth factors) greatly reducing

the amount of input required by a planner and

ultimately helping to automate and shorten annual

budgeting cycles.

2. Embrace 'What-If' Scenario Modeling

The shifting sand underneath our feet is particularly

problematic for planners. All too often organizations budget

or forecast with one economic scenario in mind. Finance

organizations often feel a great sense of accomplishment in


completing “the budget” or “the forecast” without realizing

they have focused all their attention on one potential

scenario. The concept of scenario testing is not new, yet it

is surprising how few organizations actually implement it. In

research we conducted earlier in the year, only 8% of the

entities surveyed said they simulated alternative scenarios

regularly. When we probed further with these 100+

organizations, to understand why so few were doing regular

scenario analysis, we learned the following:

WHAT ARE THE HURDLES TO SCENARIO PLANNING?

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

54%

45%

23%

14%

8%

We don’t have enough time

Our budgeting is zero based

Management hasn’t shown interest

Our model was never properly set up

We don’t have a good handle on our drivers

It is encouraging to see that finance teams don’t view

management as the impediment to performing scenario

analysis. This makes intuitive sense, as management teams

have a strong appetite for understanding sensitivities to

their business. Ideally, finance teams should present not

one forecast but several, highlighting expected

performance under different operating assumptions. There

are externally oriented scenarios that organizations can run

focusing on changes like future customer demand, GDP,

interest rates, housing starts, competitive price changes -

disruptive competitor offerings, etc., and there are

internally oriented scenarios that might focus on new

product offerings, pricing assumptions, changes in

productivity, workforce growth/decline expectations,

channel expansion, etc.

However, to succeed finance teams must first overcome

the most common hurdles. One of these is the false

perception that it takes too much time. This can be a self-

fulfilling prophecy. In reality, scenario modeling does not

need to be a time drain. Well-designed technology that’s

coupled with the right data and modeling logic results in a

great deal of process automation. Altering a driver

assumption and processing a new scenario should take

minutes, not hours or days. Most commonly it is

deficiencies in technology, data and business logic that

makes processing scenarios so time consuming. Get these

pieces right and scenario modeling should be a fast and

efficient process.

1

2

3

4

5

Driver Assumptions

Business Logic Layer

Collaboration,Inputs and Overrides

Scenario Storage

Scenario Presentation

Baseline V1 V2 V3 ...Vn

e.g. (Price * Volume – (Regional Discount Factor* Volume) * Shipping Fee) – Return % = Net Sales

Baseline V1 V2 V3 ...Vn

1. Driver Assumptions: Well-constructed scenario

planning models have identified the key drivers to the

business (internal or external). Unlike spreadsheet

models, these variables should be extracted from the

business logic and stored independently so that they

can be viewed and easily modified. The ability to clone

and alter driver assumptions as versions is also critical.

2. Business Logic Layer: The interplay between driver

variables and financial outcomes is the heart of any

scenario planning model. The goal of the business

layer is to define algorithms that best emulate the

dynamics of the organization. It should be transparent

so planners have easy access for the purpose of

tuning their models.

3. Collaboration and Inputs: The results of any driver-based process typically require the ability of subject

matter experts to review and make additional

subjective judgments regarding expected results. The

best scenario planning model enables robust

computations but also allows users to make

adjustments, giving stakeholders access and allowing

them input to their respective domains.

4. Scenario Storage: After stakeholders have given their

input, scenarios need to be efficiently stored in the

model repository. Naming, storing, and retrieving

scenarios should be straightforward for planners to

manage. It is important that all data, metadata, user

input, and calculations are stored for each scenario.

5. Scenario Presentation: The creation and efficientstorage of numerous scenarios requires an equallycompetent approach to presenting the results.

Whether in reports or dashboards, it is vital that side-


In order to get started and prove value quickly, we often

recommend a single variable sensitivity analysis – the

process of changing one variable at a time while holding

others constant and quantifying the impact of that singular

change. These types of scenarios are the easiest to process

and represent a great starting place for the organization.

3. Forecast on a "Rolling" Basis

Rolling forecasts are gaining in popularity and in some

extreme cases are even replacing the annual budget

process. Steve Player, North American program director at

the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable and an expert on

budgeting and planning, comments "In the old days, the

CFO sat in the back of the ship recording what

happened ... now, the CFO stands on the bridge looking

forward and adjusting for variables." There are multiple

factors driving this shift:

Many CFOs want to spend more time managing the future

instead of dwelling on the past, and adaptive organizations are using rolling forecasts to inform better decision making

and organizational behavior focused on optimizing top and

bottom line revenue on an ongoing basis. It is important to

remember that the ultimate purpose of forecasting is to

get the most realistic picture possible of the future for as

far out as a company’s management can see. The

business forecast should link short-term operational plans

with medium-term strategic goals.

Our recommendation for companies is to have a strategic,

long-range forecast that spans at minimum 3-5 years. This

long-range forecast should be updated at least annually.

However, when forecasting for the next 12-18 months, it is a

best practice to update or “roll” the forecast for future

quarters after the close of each period. This approach

requires a unique set of design considerations from both a

process and technology perspective. Actual and monthly

projections for 18 months provide a trended view of

performance, typically represented at an entity level. The

model helps assess current realities that will influence

longer-range (multi-year) projections, as well as detailed

operational plans.

• Time Considerations: For many finance professionals,

the annual budgeting process is an all-consuming

process that often takes at least one full business

quarter to plan their budget for the upcoming year. As

result, many finance teams essentially lose 1/4th of the

year on managing the annual budget process vs. other

value added analysis that can impact decision making.

by-side comparisons can be easily constructed

including the key drivers along with the financial

information, as well as narrative providing quick

hitting detail.

•

•

Rapid Change: Often the assumptions on which budgetsare based change even in relatively stable environmentsand are outdated within months (if not weeks) of beingfinalized. This makes most budget targets obsolete

shortly after they are prepared.

Organizational Behavior: Traditional budgets are often

tied directly to individual department goals and employee

performance evaluation and incentive processes. The

result is a budget that is heavily negotiated to the lowest

acceptable target. This can result in leaving more

aspirational growth potential untapped (and unplanned

for) and can also encourage inappropriate spending and

discourage appropriate investment.


4. Deploy Initiative Based Planning & Tracking

Initiatives provide the ‘linkage’ to translate high-level

strategy into actionable operational plans. A well designed

initiative planning and tracking process achieves two key

objectives: it establishes owners, milestones, budgets and

achievement goals for each initiative and also serves as a

mechanism for automating progress reporting across all

stakeholders. Organizations should streamline the process

of identifying, reviewing and approving new strategic

initiatives. Users should be able to collaborate with

configurable templates that guide contributors through

required inputs that highlight the business issue, quantify

any human and capital resources needed, and provide a

forward-looking view of expected business benefits.

Here are a set of key methodologies that enable successful

initiative planning and tracking:

• Common Elements in Each Request: Standardizing the

input form(s) associated with all new initiatives and

capital requests brings structure and consistency to

how proposed projects will be evaluated across

financial and non-financial measures. Initiators provide

data in their requests to define the core elements of the

project in a consistent manner - project owner and

sponsor, spend category (i.e., construction, IT,

acquisition etc.), justification, capital needs (current and

future years), timeline and strategic goal alignment.

• Evaluating and Approving Projects: Centralizing a

repository of all capital projects benefits the evaluation

teams who can then more effectively review and

compare capital requests based on strategic ‘fit’, need

and priority. This helps leaders achieve their goal of

balancing their portfolio of approved projects across

investments.

• Consistent Method for Tracking and Reporting Project

Progress: Another improvement initiative is to provide

more consistent reviews of actual spend against

approved spend for each major capital project. This

monitoring function is supported by transaction-level

financial reporting and, where appropriate, could include

commentary to highlight milestone achievements on

major projects by named project sponsors.

Base Case Given current trends, what is our financial

outlook 3-10 years?

InitiativesWhat is the impact of various growth and cost

containment initiatives

ScenariosTo evaluate go-forward plans, what is the financial

impact of different strategies?

DRIVERS MODEL: EXAMPLES INCLUDE: ANALYSIS CONTAINS:

• Volume and Service Line Mix

• Payor Mix and Net Revenue

• Labor and Cost Rates

• Re-Design ER to Improve Patient Flow Thru

• Expand Cardiac Cath Lab

• Expand OP Urgent Care

• Income Statement

• Balance Sheet

• Cash Flow

• Key Ratios

Performance reviews should be initiated at regular intervals

and technology can help to ensure project owners and contributors identify budget variances, highlight benefit

achievement, and capture comments at any level. With

workflow integrated into the process, key stakeholders

across management levels have complete visibility into the

performance of various initiatives, improving organizational

alignment. Additionally, separately-modeled initiatives

allow organizations to evaluate how directed efforts related

to growth, cost containment or process improvement will

(or should) impact functional departments.

• Workflow for Reviewing Submissions: All submissions

should follow the same workflow and can be

conditional, allowing for the automation of alerts and

notifications to downstream approvers. As an example,

large IT projects might need to go to IT and legal for

evaluation before finalizing. In doing so, these ‘expert’

reviews ensure that each project is complete and

accurate before committee review.


5. Streamline and Automate Data Collection

Architects of performance management solutions must make a series of fundamental decisions regarding data

acquisition, storage and management. These decisions will

have a major impact on an organization’s ability to

efficiently and flexibly complete the budgeting process.

Additionally, data collection methodologies can impact the

level of trust that decision makers will have in downstream

reporting.

An optimized performance management process is best served by having a single database structure that is tuned to

perform well for all performance management data types

and activities, such as strategy development, planning

(financial, staff, capital and sales), reporting, detailed

variance analysis, profitability measurement, ad hoc

analysis, and more. Using a simple example, this helps to

ensure that employee data (relational payroll data source)

and summary salary and benefits information (general ledger

data source) can easily be brought together in a single

report.

A well-designed data model should include:

1. Support for string (text) and/or date fields – These non-

numeric data types are vital for modeling purposes. For

example, this is evident in payroll modeling (hire date,

job code, review date, employee name) and in capital

planning (depreciation method and service date). The

inability of cubes to store such data types is a clear

hindrance to building a robust business model where

these data types play an important role

2. Support for large data sets – Hospitals may want to

analyze patient data, banks may want to generate

cash flows for millions of loan records, and retailers or

consumer goods organizations may want to plan at

the SKU level. Well-constructed data architectures

can accommodate these large data sets.

3. Scalability & performance –performance management

architectures should provide near real-time response

to any query. Cube-based systems are seldom near

real time, given the need to “rebuild the cube” once

leaf-level data is modified. The addition of new rollup

structures, as well as historical data, tends to degrade

performance of cube systems but has zero impact on

well-designed relational architectures.

4. On-the-fly dimension updating – There are several use

cases where on-demand dimension updating is

required. The list of plan codes or dimension elements

is not always completely predefined up front. For

example, a planner might create a new strategic

initiative that’s never existed before and has no prior

identification or place in the database. There are many

end-user scenarios where the data model needs to

evolve “on-the-fly.” Performance management

architectures should support the real-time insertion of

new dimension members by end-users.


We recommend that report authors have at least two of

these attributes in each published report. These capabilities

are not separate or distinct, but rather must be integrated

into the same process, based on the same data and –

ideally – managed within the same technology platform. All

of these plans must be kept in sync using the same

assumptions to provide a holistic outlook in both the short

and long term to support informed decisions. Ultimately,

insight is only as good as the decisions that result. A finance

professional’s job is not done upon delivery of a report, or

even an analysis. It’s done when smart decisions are

consciously made. The impact of effective operational

reporting is a more sophisticated, holistic and dynamic view

of the organization’s financial performance and strategy

execution. Rather than simply reporting “the numbers”

based on historic data, Finance begins to play a more

strategic role offering deeper insights into the “drivers” of

performance and profitability.

Managing data in a single, powerful and flexible repository

ensures it can be leveraged consistently across functions

(aka, applications) in a trusted manner. This simplifies

system administration tasks and promotes greater

management buy-in as metrics and measures easily flow

between systems (i.e. labor targets are consistent across

plans and bi-weekly productivity reporting). While this

sounds simple, certain types of planning use cases can

prove challenging to back end databases and underlying

data structures. Leading-edge companies make a

concerted effort to design a back end data architecture

that fully supports virtually ALL planning requirements.

6. Tie Operational Reporting to Strategic Objectives

In well-run organizations everyone has a sense of the overall

mission and how their respective role, however small, fits

within the big picture. This is termed “vertical alignment” –

the notion or idea that from the shop floor to the top floor,

and every level in between, there is clarity regarding the

goals and objectives of the organization and all the activities

that surround it. Finance can be a key enabler of

organizational alignment – as the custodian of the long

range plan or the set of corporate KPIs and metrics.

Finance also has an important role to play in translating the

big picture into digestible initiatives, target metrics and

plans to be consumed and enacted upon by the masses.

Shared ownership and execution is critical. Too often the

strategic plan’s final resting place is in shelved 3 ring

binders or stale PowerPoint presentations; when in fact its

fingerprints should be present in every operational plan and

metric for the coming year.

Reporting is more effective when outlier variances have an

explanation or action plan associated with it. This improved

feedback loop promotes greater accountability and visibility

across all levels of the organization.

Add Intelligence to Your Reporting

Below are seven attributes that enhance reporting intelligence:

1. Relevance – Are the metrics, ratios and measures trulypertinent to the business and the report recipient?

2. Trends – Trends are real, budgets and forecasts are not. Trends deliver insight about what’s happening directionally.

3. Tolerance – Decide ahead of time what the thresholdsare for when a particular trend should become an areaof focus.

4. Early Alerts – Set the limits in advance so the systemcan automatically do the monitoring for you. One of themost valuable things performance managementsystems can deliver is time for decision-making; earlyalerts can help you do that.

5. Calls to Action – Allow decision-makers to focus on areas that require immediate attention.

6. Forecast Impact – Provide guidance as to the likely outcome if a particular trend is allowed to persist.

7. Additional context – Provide information on why a particular situation might be happening. For example,

patient care may be dropping because of the greater-than-expected use of contract labor.


Axiom EPM™ is a trademark of Axiom Group LLC in the United States & other countries.

Axiom EPM corporate office

10260 SW Greenburg Rd., Suite 710

Portland, OR 97223

toll free: 877.691.9969 | fax: 503.961.1176

sales: 503.977.0234 x115

email: [email protected]

www.axiomepm.com

Axiom EPM offerings include:

• Budgeting & Forecasting

• Reporting & Analytics

• Strategy Management

• Capital Planning & Tracking

• Profitability & Cost Management

• Consolidations

• Dashboards & Mobility

About Axiom EPM

Founded by industry leaders with over two decades of experience in enterprise planning and reporting, Axiom EPM

delivers performance management solutions for mid-sized

and large organizations around the world. Solutions for

budgeting and forecasting, reporting and analytics, strategy

management, capital planning, profitability and cost

management are delivered on a single unified platform.

Axiom EPM embraces and extends familiar Microsoft

Excel® functionality, allowing finance professionals to

manage data in a familiar environment — while providing

unmatched modeling flexibility and enterprise performance.

About the Author

Tony Ard is Director of Solutions Engineering at Axiom

EPM. Tony has 20 years in the Enterprise Performance

Management industry and is widely recognized for

delivering innovative solutions with a focus on client

satisfaction. Tony is involved in key software industry

processes including development, solution management,

field enablement, thought leadership, technical sales,

partner management, and implementation consulting. He

has delivered software systems for enterprise performance

management processes from budgeting, strategic planning,

capital planning, forecasting, and profitability management

and has also developed business intelligence and business

analytic solutions.

We've presented best practices for various forms of

planning such as the annual budget, rolling forecast and

long-range plan, to not only help financial professionals be

more successful in their role, but to facilitate the transition

from the more traditional number cruncher role to trusted

advisor guiding data-driven decision making. And finance

teams that embrace this new strategic role require a

technology foundation that is agile and flexible to support

rapidly changing assumptions and business models, as well

as providing a unified platform encompassing not only the

budgeting, forecasting and reporting functions detailed in

this paper, but related activities such as strategy

management, capital planning, consolidations, profitability

and cost management. Adopting these best practice

methodologies can help you to improve and shorten your budgeting process and will also enable better decision

making and organizational alignment that will help you to

optimize performance.

Summary

improve and shorten your planning cycleimprove and shorten your planning cycle. 3. while there is no...

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