“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” – Thomas Edison

In today’s volatile business environment, companies can’t afford to rely on annual plans. Forward thinking organisations are now enabling their finance teams to link operations with strategies, allowing them to identify, adapt to, and implement change – as fast as the business needs.

Moving beyond their traditional roles, the finance office is now being equipped with unified platforms which not only enable them to do their routine tasks with ease, but equip them with the business intelligence, collaborative environment, and data-centricity they need for effective planning. In an age where data is the new oil, gaining insights has become the competitive advantage all companies are looking for.

As a result, millions are being spent on analytics tools for data collection, reporting, consolidations and modelling. In reality, however, the finance function can achieve a lot of those goals through data-driven planning and forecasts.

Hours spent on reconciling and standardising data, building reports and models spread across different systems, and linking them to an analytics solution doesn’t just raise expenditure and labour, but accumulates considerable man-hours which could have been spent on modelling contingency plans and what-if scenarios for effective decision-making. A single, comprehensive solution enables planning in an adaptable, intelligent way.

Analytics-enabled planning

Most organisations have different planning, reporting and analytics activities happening across the business, and often lack comprehensive co-ordination of plans. This allows each department and business unit to approach planning differently, make different assumptions, and focus investment on the localised issues important to themselves. Without central control and co-ordination of cross-functional plans, the goals and trajectory set within the organisational strategy become lost in the noise and get watered down.

Gartner reports that over half of the financial planning inquiries its analysts receive relate to aligning operational and financial planning. With finance as custodians of the central financial plan, the opportunity to extend their best principles and expertise of FP&A into planning across the enterprise can ensure departmental objectives are aligned to business objectives.

When plans are unified, companies experience a more rapid journey towards their corporate goals, but not all finance functions are able to drive this because the focus of digitisation within their department has not provided them with the right tools. As a result, companies have started looking for analytics-enabled planning solutions.

An integrated business solution should enable you to:

• Understand past performance data

• • Target the right kind of customer based on past sales and interactions
  • Deduce with past data on what makes your product line stand out.
  • Keep a check on when cash is due and how to plan for long-term investments.

• Unite people and data

• • Foster a collaborative environment within the business where teams operate in harmony and transparency.
  • Consolidate workforce, finance, accounts and sales data to create clear performance reports and dashboards.
  • Plan for production, payment, and sales strategies, aligning with your purchasing and marketing capacity.
  • Put data-backed business policies to practice and create predictive models and forecasts.

• Accelerate and adapt

• • Predict and plan for any challenges coming ahead.
  • Take note of supply and demand trends and use planning to speed up production.

Steer towards profitability and growth

There are endless claims about the potential for digital technologies to make the finance department more strategic and forward looking. But the truth is that many companies have focused their finance digitisation efforts on transactional and reporting processes, rather than forward looking planning and decision-making activities. It’s easy to see why, when automation technologies such as RPA and AI are widely available and continuously touted for their cost-saving and scalability benefits.

While cost efficiency undoubtedly has value in terms of reduced error-rates and faster reporting cycles; focusing all your digitisation efforts here is like buying a high-performance car to do the weekly shopping. Digital technologies enable businesses to harness the immense power and potential of data, and with the right tools, finance can spend less time chasing, formatting, and adjusting data and more time planning, scenario-modelling, and forecasting.

If these opportunities have been overlooked in your finance digitisation, then you have likely missed the most strategically valuable part. The most important decisions finance can help an organisation make is how to steer towards profitability and growth. To do this, the finance planning team needs the capability to model multiple multi-year business scenarios, predict sales by channel and geography, and forecast the financial components in terms of operating and capital expenditures. This provides real insight into potential business performance which, in turn, enables the organisation to establish their strategic goals and a trajectory to reach them. If this can then be expressed and managed in a single unified plan, then the chances of success increase significantly.