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scenario modeling

FP&A Done Right: To Recover from Economic Shock, Are CFOs Envisioning Enough Scenarios?

October 16, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Adaptive Insights, written by Bob Hansen. Hansen explains the why scenario modeling is imperative when facing disruption.

Three out of four finance executives recently acknowledged that the planning processes their companies have in place do not equip them to respond quickly to major economic and geopolitical disruption.

Published in November of last year, the survey results could hardly have been more timely. Just a few weeks later, a virus would emerge in Wuhan, China, that would touch off a global pandemic, sending shocks through virtually every business.

Few could possibly have predicted how this event could have sent recently minted plans and forecasts for 2020 into trash bins everywhere. But even before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, CFOs and other execs were keenly aware that business conditions were unpredictable. They were equally aware of the hurdles keeping them from the adaptability and agility needed to outmaneuver and pivot around unforeseen obstacles. The same 75% of survey respondents who said their planning processes left them vulnerable also reported that outdated legacy planning systems, siloed planning processes with limited collaboration, and a lack of relevant workforce skills were keeping them from embracing the one thing their business needed to weather the storms of disruption: agility.

If ever there was a time to marshal all the tools and technology available to help organizations meet the needs of persistent, significant change, that time is now. And as businesses figure out how to recover from the initial shocks brought by the pandemic, gaining a clearer picture of what the future could hold may well be priceless.

CFOs have known this all along

A look back shows that finance executives have long recognized the importance of agility—and the need to plan for the unexpected. A 2016 global survey found that 67% of CFOs respondents said they were concerned about economic uncertainty in their region. Those worries turned out to be prescient. Soon would come tumultuous trade wars and other global impacts, culminating eventually in an unprecedented global pandemic impacting public health, transportation, critical supply chains, and more.

Indeed, forces like digital transformation, automation, and globalization have made agility a business imperative. Though change is a constant, it continues to accelerate.

Now, with so much uncertainty in front of us, agility is more important than ever.

Scenario planning: The reality check every business needs

Back in 2016, CFOs were asked how they could add the most strategic value when managing through an economic or business contraction. Nearly half (48%) said planning for multiple scenarios could help reduce risk by allowing their organizations to respond and course-correct when conditions change.

Since then, scenario planning has become an even more critical capability for finance and beyond. For businesses, it’s helpful to understand that scenario planning isn’t about modeling the likely effects of a specific disruption, such as a pandemic. Why? Because a disrupted supply chain could result from any number of causes: a natural disaster, a fuel crisis, a regional currency crash, political unrest, a pandemic—the list is virtually endless. So it’s important to instead build scenarios based on the likely impacts and model around those. Running what-if scenarios involving possibilities like cost cutting or changes in demand helps to prepare a series of contingency plans to address the financial, operational, and cash flow impacts that could result from specific disruptions.

And companies are doing this now more than ever before. For example, one higher education institution is running scenarios around the loss of room and board revenue, the possibility of fewer returning students, and the expenses associated with remote online learning. Another example is a healthcare organization that has used multidimensional, driver-based modeling capabilities to make course corrections while managing changes in patient volumes, increased government regulations, and a decline in insurance reimbursement.

Regardless of the industry or use case, multiple scenario planning empowers organizations to isolate their drivers, model according to how those drivers might be impacted, and sharpen their foresight to know what their future selves might need to do. It’s a reality check for a reality that hasn’t yet happened.

Scenario planning beyond the bottom line

How are these companies able to conjure up a crystal ball and peer into a mix of their possible futures? They do it through active planning.

Unlike its manual, siloed, episodic, static predecessor, active planning is comprehensive, continuous, and collaborative. Active planning processes are fueled by real-time data, powerful automation, and advanced technologies like machine learning to help planners throughout the business model what-if scenarios with virtually no limits—while iterating multiple scenarios rapidly to identify the most likely outcomes and most effective actions. The most advanced platforms even help you identify erroneous predictions, so you can have more confidence in the scenarios you model. Meanwhile, monitoring results helps you to identify trends and patterns that could further refine your scenario model.

By incorporating financial and nonfinancial inputs that might be impacted by economic disruptions into your active planning model, you can draw more parallels between drivers and better understand how one affects the other. Your responding game plan will also be more comprehensive, encompassing multiple departments for swifter execution and more precise pivots. This includes financial, workforce, and salesplanning.

Are you exploring enough what-ifs?

The right platform will allow CFOs and their teams to model any number of scenarios—and modeling enough of them could mean the difference between success and failure. Just be sure these scenarios are anchored around your key business drivers so that you avoid wandering off into low-value explorations that tie up valuable resources to game out extremely unlikely events.

But do assess a wide range of outcomes, including best case, worst case, and most likely. Generating a 360-degree view of potential outcomes helps you and your organizational leaders make better decisions. And developing strong internal communications to distribute and disseminate scenarios quickly and with the right people allows you to stay on top of changing conditions and quickly shift gears.

To jump-start the what-if scenario modeling process, ask questions that will help you fully explore the possibilities of a business interruption, price war, revenue slide, or any other scenario worth planning for:

  • What do financial hits like deferred revenue or default payments do to revenue forecasts? How will they affect demand planning for things like potential location closures or inventory imbalances?
  • How will you balance your short-term workforce needs against the long-term needs of the business?
  • Is there a shortage of a certain skill set that’s currently high in demand and lacking in your area? How can you source people with those skills?
  • What if you forgo hiring until the next quarter or even the quarter after that?
  • What happens if you need to reduce employee pay or staff levels?
  • How will you adjust your goals or quotes, and what does the ripple effect of that look like throughout the sales department?
  • What if your sales pipeline freezes or shrinks?
  • How can you adjust for potential reduction of sales resources, and how will that impact bookings, productivity, and costs?
  • How will seasonality affect already disrupted cash flow?

You’re not a fortuneteller, but you can be better prepared

You may not be able to predict the next pandemic, the next recession, or the latest technological advancement that sends shockwaves through your industry. But if you model enough of the most critical what-if scenarios, you can meet disruption with agility. And that may be the most valuable outcome of all.

This blog post was originally published by Adaptive Insights.

Home » scenario modeling

Filed Under: FP&A Done Right Tagged With: active planning, Adaptive Insights, Analytics, Budgeting, Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, disruption, driver-based modeling, Financial Performance Management, scenario modeling, scenario planning, what-if scenarios, Workday Adaptive Planning

FP&A Done Right: FP&A Tips for Scenario Modeling During COVID-19

July 24, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

FP&A Done Right

This is a guest blog post from our partner Adaptive Insights, written by Steve Dunne. It is a unique Q&A with Kinnari Desai, Workday’s senior director of corporate finance, on how Workday responded to the FP&A impact of COVID-19.

Kinnari Desai, Workday’s senior director of corporate finance, has deep insight into scenario modeling and how Workday approached this following the outbreak of COVID-19. We spoke with her to get more best practices and tips for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams.

How did Workday have to adapt its business planning process following the start of the crisis?

We were coming off the back of our annual planning cycle and thanking our teams for their efforts in delivering “Plan A.” Then of course, everything changed with COVID-19. We had to spring right back into action, modelling scenarios in an environment that was so new—and seemingly changing hour by hour.

I believe that in an uncertain environment like this, it’s very important the FP&A team aligns with the leadership team, understands the context of what’s happening, and looks at a small number of relevant scenarios. It can be easy to get carried away producing several scenarios, but the goal is to provide the leadership with a range of likely outcomes and provide data, in a simple way, that would enable decision making.

In these situations, I’d imagine speed is of the essence, but you have to get it right if scenario modeling data is going to be valuable to your business leadership?

I do think it’s important to execute quickly, but in order to achieve our objectives, we had to be thoughtful in our approach.

As a business, you have to agree on your priorities. Are you going to focus on top-line growth, cash, the impact of employee relief programs, hiring pauses, and so on? Then you should consider the impact of those on the P&L and cash flow.

The next big thing is getting input from the business. While we are always in lock-step with our business partners since we can’t model in a vacuum, it’s more important than ever to meet with the operational business leaders, gather their perspectives, and understand what’s top-of-mind for them. You should be meeting with leaders multiple times to quickly narrow down focus areas that are a priority for them, such as support for employees, availability of equipment, and hiring direction.

From there, how do you start thinking about how you’ll use scenario modeling to drive decision making and elements such as forecasting?

In our case we had to adapt our scenario modeling frequency to help us make decisions faster. This impacts things like forecasting —we could no longer rely entirely on a monthly forecast process, so we adjusted the process slightly. This has led our FP&A team to a more continuous approach to planning, versus point-in-time or quarterly updates.

There are areas like revenue and cash that we are visiting on a weekly or even a daily basis. Then there are other areas that we may not review daily, but look at more frequently than before. We also discussed as a team that at times, the level of guidance we can give to other internal teams may not be as detailed or defined as it has historically been, since the situation is constantly evolving. As a result, we all need to remain agile.

Last but not least, we also identified drivers of large spend, and cost levers that can be pulled should the need arise.

Technology obviously plays a key part in enabling scenario modeling. Can you tell us a bit about how you used Workday Adaptive Planning to drive the whole process?

Part of our job is to provide a sense of calm amidst chaos, and the Workday tools and data model enabled us to do just that. We spun up different versions in Workday Adaptive Planning, and adjusted the drivers like new business and renewal rates for revenue. For expenses, for example, we tweaked the timing of hiring, and the related impact on other expenses like benefits and employee relations costs were updated right away since they are based on timing of hire.

We were able to leverage actuals data from Workday Financial Management into our forecasts. This enabled us to see the resulting impact on the P&L and cash flow right away. All in all, we were able to speed up the process and operate 50% faster versus using spreadsheets. And the ability to use one data model and driver-based forecasting was very valuable.

What is the magic number when it comes to scenario modeling?

We modeled three different scenarios, and I think that’s a good number to work with during a fluid situation like this. I strongly recommend for my friends and colleagues in FP&A that they don’t drive themselves crazy doing 15 different scenarios! We don’t know everything yet, and spinning up more scenarios isn’t necessarily going to provide the answers.

We aligned on three possibilities and reasoned why these are important. This allowed us to focus on what matters, keeping it manageable so important decisions can be made without data overload.

What would your advice be to other FP&A professionals looking at ways to improve their business planning models today?

I’d start with “over-communicate.” I really can’t emphasize enough the importance of communication. We’ve moved to a remote, digital world, so hallway conversations are no longer a possibility. We needed to ensure emails are not misinterpreted, so we checked in via Slack or had quick Zoom calls. We provided financial guidelines on how to operate in the near term and why these are key.

For publishing updated forecasts to finance, accounting, and lines of business, we heavily leveraged our management reporting capability in Workday. Keeping these stakeholders informed on the approach and current thinking, even when all decisions have not been made yet, goes a long way.

Educate the business as well as accounting. In a changing environment, accounting also needs to be informed of the latest plan so they know what to expect (actuals) relative to the plan. This helps them as they prepare for and move through a remote close —with confidence and in concert with FP&A. The business will also need guidance to understand the latest plan and take action accordingly. Keep an eye on the fundamentals of the business, and take this as an opportunity to rethink some of the processes and outputs.

And lastly, remain agile. As the market continues to shift, we will need to remain flexible so that we can continue to pivot as needed. This is not a one-time shift in light of COVID-19, but a new and more agile way of operating that will allow finance to continuously adapt to change.

This blog post was originally published by Adaptive Insights and appeared here.

Read more guest posts from Adaptive Insights:

FP&A Done Right: 3 Words for a COVID-19 World –“Flexible Budget Variance”

FP&A Done Right: What FP&A Must Do Differently to Make Planning a Success

FP&A Done Right: Modernize your Budget Process to Anticipate Change

Home » scenario modeling

Filed Under: FP&A Done Right Tagged With: Adaptive Insights, Analytics, Budgeting, Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, cloud financial performance management, COVID-19, Financial Performance Management, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, scenario modeling, Workday, Workday Adaptive Planning

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