Bringing Analytics to the CFO
by Michael Watson
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the rising need for analytics on the CFO’s team.
The article highlighted how CFO created groups for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) that went beyond normal finance functions and helped the business run better.
The article gave the example of the FP&A team at Dunkin Donuts help improve store performance and at GoDaddy expand into new countries.
What I found interesting about the article was that it showed that that the FP&A teams needed to start getting value from the data to help make business decisions. The article mentioned that his new role would help the financial team get away from the perception that they are only watching budgets.
We think the financial organizations are ripe for building analytics skills to help with:
- Better financial forecasting using external data
- Better understanding the impacts of different prices and promotions on the business
- Determining the true landed cost of items and drivers of those costs
- Understanding the chances of success for new products based on initial sales data
- Better leveraging detailed sales data (transactional data for business-to-business companies, or point of sale data for those who sell through stores or online).
- Determining the likelihood of inventory going obsolete and how to avoid that
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