Build resilience with an agile FP&A function

The COVID-19 crisis has compelled organizations to operate in an economically volatile environment. For businesses to remain financially resilient while still striving for growth in the near future, they are turning to their financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to guide them through the uncertainty. But now FP&A teams have new datasets to analyze, insights to generate, and actions to take under ambiguous circumstances. And with the demand for more frequent forecasts, only few are able to meet businesses' expectations.

Impact assessment – With the need to constantly update the forecasting models, the traditional planning and forecasting frameworks most organizations use prevent FP&A teams from completing a comprehensive impact assessment.

Financial stress testing – Organizations that have not implemented connected planning or driver-based forecasting are finding it difficult to adequately stress-test for the worst-case scenarios and enable their businesses to plan for contingencies.

Data analytics and machine learning (ML)-driven scenario modeling – Though machine learning has made inroads in some organizations' forecasting and planning processes, in this situation, some ML-based models are struggling because of the lack of historic data to train the algorithms.

Working remotely and balancing regular versus additional work – FP&A teams are not set up to work remotely as they require smooth coordination between business functions and finance. Continuous forecasting and the need for analytics is putting pressure on already-inundated FP&A teams. Firms that have broken data models or rely on spreadsheets for reporting are struggling to manage the disruption.

We help companies create a more agile FP&A function by adopting integrated business planning, analytics on demand, and scalable operating models and enhancing how it informs a company's strategic decision-making.

In the immediate short term: Injecting agility

• Insights on demand: Genpact's “analytics on demand" helps FP&A teams with data and insights to not only define and measure business metrics, but also own and drive them.
• Resetting forecasting models: Genpact brings in the use of internal and external data to help FP&A adjust and improve forecasts and prediction to help their businesses revalidate strategies for present scenarios.

Over short-to-medium term: Optimizing the cost-to-serve

• Process maturity assessment: Genpact, with its proprietary digital framework asset ProcIndex, helps companies holistically understand maturity across FP&A processes, policies, technology, operating model, controls and performance metrics, and identify improvement areas to optimize cost.
• Process automation assessment: Genpact's Intelligent Automation Index (IAI) helps companies target digital investments by finding process parts where the ability to automate tasks is higher, by identifying areas of data synthesis, reconciliation and adjustments that require a great deal of manual effort.
• Software license cost optimization: Genpact's governance framework tracks software license usage and identifies ways to reduce application touchpoints and prevents the business from overspending on licenses.
• Reports rationalization: Genpact helps companies clean up their reporting landscape with a standardized yet comprehensive set of reports using its report rationalization framework. It also facilitates creating persona-focused self-service reporting structures using tools such as Alteryx and Tableau.

Over the longer term: Building business resilience

• Data solutions: Genpact helps you unlock business value with a sound data strategy, architecture, and governance. It designs, implements, configures, and manages your data ecosystems, creating nimbleness and speed for reporting and decision-making. It also integrates data from multiple silos into a data lake to create a single source of master data for accelerated reporting and analytics.
• Cloud-based planning solution: Genpact's cloud-based integrated business planning solution in partnership with Anaplan helps you build dynamic economic models on a common platform to plan, report, analyze, and steer business more collaboratively. It helps you uncover opportunities and risks with predictive analytics, machine learning, and scenario modeling.
• Business KPI trees: Genpact, with its digital Smart Enterprise Processes (SEP^SM) framework, helps you link key business outcomes to process-level KPIs. This creates a KPI value chain for a logical flow of data to insights and becomes an established process to systematically bring business insights into scenario modeling for better and faster actions.
• Operating model design: Genpact's operating model playbook helps companies align to changes ushered in by the COVID-19 situation. It helps you understand the mix of transactional, analytical, and business partnering activities and identify those that can reside in a center of excellence, as well as others that should be part of global business networks. It also brings together FP&A and finance process analytics for faster, better insights.

We partnered with a spectrum of companies – across industries – to help them inject agility into their FP&A functions and improve business outcomes.

Reporting and analytics:

• A consumer goods company rationalized more than 80% of its reporting requirements using our report rationalization framework
• A multinational footwear company deployed cash-flow analytics to drive $500–$700 million in cash-flow improvement annually
• A pharmacy benefits management company improved operating margins by $27 million and identified upsell opportunities with our financial analytics solution

Planning and forecasting:

• A multinational snack food company optimized its strategic planning cycle time by more than 40% by deploying our integrated business planning solution
• A multinational network infrastructure provider used driver-based forecasting to achieve 95% accuracy in annual revenue forecasts
• A consumer electronics company enabled more than 32% improvement in inventory forecast accuracy and 90% reduction of stockout instances with our solution

Learn more about how Genpact can help with enterprise performance management.