The Importance of Agility in FP&A To Manage Uncertainty
Times of crisis mean uncertainty, both personally and professionally. Anyone who makes “gut instinct” decisions in a hurry isn’t making decisions that are well-informed and carefully considered. For organizations of all sizes and sectors, this is particularly important for FP&A. In this blog post, we’ll look at the importance of agility in FP&A in being able to better manage uncertainties, even during uncertain times and build resilience for the future.
Business Continuity
Business continuity is of paramount importance in times of uncertainty, especially for FP&A professionals in strategic roles in their organization. While times of crisis do eventually pass, history shows that the measurable economic impact can linger. Even in times of crisis, it is crucial to be able to make well-informed decisions instead of simply reacting based on gut instinct.
The importance of real time data
How do you ensure business continuity for your organization? How do you ensure you can continue operating as smoothly as possible? Proper planning is essential to achieve this, and regularly updated data is imperative in this process. Ideally, you have live, real-time data. When integrated data is available in real time for FP&A professionals and across the organization, you always have the best basis for making strategic recommendations and making informed assessments.
Especially in times of uncertainty, when new information can change the scope of action of businesses on a daily basis, it is important to react to unexpected, but potentially long-lasting effects on the company’s ability to act.
Planning and performance management
What happens if a supplier has bottlenecks or business operations are facing severe restrictions in a particular country or region? A modern enterprise performance management solution helps decision makers to prepare and analyze data and share insights. What-if scenario analyses and simulations can also help to prepare for multiple eventualities. With multidimensional databases, data is viewed from various angles and drill-downs and drill-throughs are available at any time to examine correlations even on a very detailed level and thus derive recommendations even quicker.
Plans and budgets can thus be continuously and automatically adjusted to take account for rapidly changing circumstances. With a multidimensional database as the “single source of truth” at the core, a modern EPM solution helps decision-makers in an organization gain the agility they so urgently need to make the right decisions in times of uncertainty.
Better agility increases resiliency
Resilience is defined as being able to quickly recover from difficulties. Achieving greater agility and efficiency supports continuous planning, budgeting and forecasting. Improving agility only increases the resiliency of an organization in the long run. Improving the agility and responsiveness of an organization with a modern enterprise performance management solution not only increases its resiliency, but ensure it better maintain a competitive edge once the storm passes.
This blog post is the first in a three part series on the importance of agility to manage uncertainty. Next week we welcome a guest to the Jedox blog who will share their expertise on expediting economic recovery after a crisis.
