Improving Finance’s Financial Planning & Analysis Capabilities

As the role of the finance function continues to evolve from reporting on what happened in the past to driving business performance and creating enterprise value, the function’s financial planning and analysis capabilities need to be improved.

More than ever, increased volatility and uncertainty is placing considerable pressure on finance leaders to support business decision-makers by delivering actionable real-time insights.

Finance leaders are required to have a 360 degrees view of the risks and opportunities the organization is exposed to and respond promptly to change.

Recently, CFO Research in collaboration with SAP conducted a global survey of senior finance executives across various industry segments to better understand how finance leaders are supporting decision-making and value-creation purposes within their organizations. Based on 335 senior finance executives’ responses, the survey revealed the following four key findings:

1. Being agile is becoming an increasingly source of competitive advantage. In a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business environment, having the ability to respond and adapt to change is the key to survival and value creation. Unfortunately, volatility and uncertainty is the norm these days. This in turn is requiring finance to provide real-time analysis and decision support. Of the surveyed finance executives, 84% are expecting senior management demand for adhoc decision support and analysis from finance to increase more in the coming years.
2. Current financial planning and analysis IT systems are failing to deliver actionable insights. Organizational CFOs are hungry to see their functions conduct highly sophisticated, predictive business analysis, such as scenario planning, “what-if” analysis and risk modelling. However, current IT systems are falling short of intensifying demands for real-time analysis. For example, 53% of the senior finance executives responded that they are trading off sophisticated, predictive business analysis in order to produce reports in a timely manner. Furthermore, 14% are currently able to instantly respond to ad-hoc reports for business analysis via interactive, self-service interfaces. The majority (61%) of senior finance leaders are responding within one day of receiving request and 20% are responding more than one day after receiving the request.
3. Lack of integration between financial planning and core ERP systems. Only 36% of survey respondents indicated that their company’s financial planning systems are well integrated with each other, with minimal manual intervention. Further worrying, only 15% of the respondents indicated that those financial planning systems are very tightly integrated with their core ERP systems and require minimal data migration.
4. There is increased pressure on finance teams to drive business performance and create value. One of the critical mandates of the organization’s finance function is delivering more forward-looking and more interactive information and analysis into the hands of business decision makers. As the business environment continues to evolve, 88% of the surveyed finance leaders agree that this mandate will increase more in the coming years.

In light of these findings, what should senior finance executives and their teams do?

1. To be the organization’s sought-after trusted adviser, finance must move beyond focusing only on the company and its profits and start seeking new opportunities to grow the business and expand. A team is as good as its leader. The finance leader must make sure that his team constitutes people with diverse backgrounds but all working towards the same goals of delivering real-time actionable insights, managing enterprise risks and creating sustainable value. It is critical to have people who possess the ability to challenge current assumptions and ask the right questions. People who do not possess a herd mentality but are prepared to go against the status quo as long as they are bringing something tangible to the group.
2. The finance function must become agile, innovative and adaptive. Disruption in the business environment demands the function to develop new management models, standardize processes and be responsive to threats and opportunities. Keeping abreast of what is happening in the business environment, both externally and internally, helps sense and respond to changes quickly. Playing a “wait-and-see” game is no longer sufficient in today’s ever-changing business landscape. Business leaders need to be able to thoroughly scan their operating environments, understand risks and opportunities and take immediate strategic action.
3. In order to improve the function’s financial planning and analysis capabilities, senior finance executives must ensure that their organizations have invested in IT systems that meet the demands of real-time, ad-hoc analysis. For example, the IT system must be able to conduct highly sophisticated, predictive business analysis in timely manner. Finance must be able to deliver more than just reporting on historical data and have the ability to deliver clear, actionable, forward-looking and real-time insights. Furthermore, it is important that finance provides reports and analysis that is easily understood by all managers to enable them make effective decisions.
4. The organization’s financial planning and the core ERP systems must be integrated to ensure more effective decision-making. As the providers of information and analysis for sound decision-making, finance should ensure that it is providing one version of the truth always. It is therefore critical to have tight integration of financial systems with the other ERP systems if the function is to provide decision support and help create value. The integration of the systems should require minimal manual intervention and minimal data migration. In other words, there should be a reduced amount of time, attention and resources devoted to data migration and manual reconciliation connected with financial planning and business analysis. Having an integration of systems helps achieve consistency in processes and transparency of data throughout the consolidation data to financial results.
5. Not all data is important for decision making, some of it is just noise. One of the barriers to improving financial planning and analysis capabilities is lack of data standardization across the organization. In today’s information age, it is critical that finance leaders and their teams are able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Data used for planning purposes must be validated and consistent throughout the company. How reliable and timely are your data sources? Also, there is need to train employees on the importance of data decision-making and data science.

As the pressure on senior executives intensifies to manage increasingly complex businesses and improve the organization’s competitive position, finance leaders will always be expected to deliver insights and analysis that are able to make the most difference to the business.