By Bharath Srinivas
While the Covid-19 pandemic left many eating places throughout the U.S. reeling in its wake, Tex-Mex chain Chuy’s noticed a chance to make use of steady planning to rework uncertainty into larger profitability.
The pandemic was a catalyst for Chuy’s to rethink its operations and planning, changing its outdated monetary planning and evaluation (FP&A) options with a extra versatile system of instruments and processes that provides its groups the real-time knowledge and predictive insights it must chart their group’s course.
Using Technology for Change Management
If your group spends copious quantities of time attempting to work with legacy expertise for monetary planning and struggles to satisfy buyer expectations, you’re not alone.
One of the keys to sustaining a aggressive benefit in as we speak’s market is your capability to make use of automation expertise to assist set the tempo for change administration. An actual-time monetary image is important for making knowledgeable choices primarily based on data-driven insights.
Natalie Harden, director of finance at Chuy’s, says that a man-made intelligence (AI)-powered steady planning framework allows the firm to carry out situation forecasting of its money wants and offers the requisite instruments to keep up and monitor its profitability. “I don’t have to even think about data consolidation anymore,” she says.
Increasing Agility with Continuous Planning
Continuous planning allows your group to regulate extra simply to altering enterprise situations. Replacing legacy FP&A applied sciences and processes with a complete cloud-based platform could make it simpler to combine knowledge from different purposes—akin to enterprise useful resource planning (ERP), human capital administration, and buyer relationship administration—without having for third-party instruments.
ERP automation aggregates your knowledge and offers a versatile, scalable platform that optimizes determination making primarily based on every little thing from workforce and income projections to capital bills and gross sales targets so your group can rapidly transfer from planning to execution in response to altering market situations.
Overcoming legacy IT constraints additionally will increase organizational agility, providing you with a larger capability to plan, execute, and analyze utilizing one built-in system. Streamlined FP&A expertise may scale back bottlenecks and assist get rid of friction in your small business processes.
Continuous planning was a vital think about enabling The E.W. Scripps Company to flourish after it bought its flagship newspaper division so it might give attention to its TV and leisure enterprise. Using the proper instruments and applied sciences for integrating transaction and reporting knowledge in actual time provides Scripps a holistic view of economic administration, human sources (HR), and payroll.
“We found opportunities to link finance and HR better, including improvements in how we use data,” says Kevin McDonald, vp for folks providers and insights at Scripps. “We discovered that reporting, analysis, and planning often took a back seat to the time and effort spent chasing and reconciling data.”
Overcoming legacy constraints with automation enabled Scripps to make use of real-time knowledge to make knowledgeable enterprise choices whereas mitigating dangers and enhancing organization-wide oversight. In addition to getting extra correct budgets and forecasts, steady planning helped Scripps dramatically scale back its enterprise planning cycles, consolidating 32 methods into a single platform. Integrating planning and knowledge evaluation processes diminished its month-to-month reporting time from two days to about 30 seconds.
More Agile Forecasting and Analysis
The outcomes Chuy’s and Scripps achieved underscore how a steady planning mannequin will help your organization use superior applied sciences for implementing a extra agile method to planning.
FP&A groups can use extra highly effective modeling, reporting, and analytics to unlock invaluable insights into rising tendencies, buyer preferences, and aggressive landscapes.
Armed with a complete and up-to-the-minute understanding of the market, your group can extra confidently chart its course and seize alternatives that the planning practices you’re utilizing as we speak—nonetheless battle-tested they’re—could also be obscuring out of your view, thus maintaining you from rising to your full potential.
Bharath Srinivas is world chief expertise officer, Accenture Workday Business Group.
Learn find out how to undertake a steady planning system to change into a extra agile group.
