Resource Fluidity

Amid increasingly volatile business environments, companies must learn to harness technology to efficiently generate accurate forecasts.

What could your business achieve if your large capital projects were 30 to 50 percent faster and cheaper? The opportunity is more real than you think.

Freeing up cash on the balance sheet may be hard, but companies such as Johnson Controls are finding ways to establish a sustainable cash culture.

CFOs want FP&A to become stewards of value creation, not just keep score.

Product costing. A lost art?

A sprint-based transformation approach can help organizations achieve full potential.

Support and control functions like human resources and finance can empower Agile teams and benefit from becoming more Agile themselves.

Many companies operate some type of supply-chain control tower, but upgrading to a digital, end-to-end nerve center can manage risk even more effectively, while boosting output and productivity.

In our experience, leading players connect their internal finance systems with digital tools in the boardroom for agile impact modeling. Getting the scenario approach right is fundamental in these models, and five best practices have emerged.

CVC [corporate venture capital] can be a good tool for staying current on emerging trends and technologies, identifying growth areas, de-risking M&A, and moving faster than traditional R&D. Companies might consider CVC investing to reap future benefits from new products, technologies and geographies.

Budgeting, as most corporations practice it, should be abolished. That may sound like a radical proposition, but it would be merely the culmination of long-running efforts to transform organizations from centralized hierarchies into devolved networks that allow for nimble adjustments to market conditions.

Peter Drucker once commented that “trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” Though we agree with Drucker that forecasting is hard, managers are constantly asked to predict the future — be it to project future product sales, anticipate company profits, or plan for investment returns. Good forecasts hold the key to good plans. 

Corporate budgeting is a joke, and everyone knows it. It consumes a huge amount of executives’ time, forcing them into endless rounds of dull meetings and tense negotiations. It encourages managers to lie and cheat, lowballing targets and inflating results, and it penalizes them for telling the truth…