By Kobkul Chintanawetchakul, XP&A Practice PMsquare (Thailand)
It is inevitable to say that our world is in the VUGA era: V -Volatility U -Uncertainty C -Complexity A -Ambiguity. Thai CFO also faces uncertainty from the global situation, such as the spread of COVID-19, Russo-Ukrainian War and FED & QE Tapering which bring about serious impact to the global economic downturn as a result of the spike of crude oil, energy, inflation, interest rate and the depreciation of Thai Baht. These macro factors bring inevitable impacts on industry and businesses. Digital Transformation and Extended Planning & Analytics (XP&A) is an important tool to help CFOs deeply assess the risks, opportunities and financial implications from macro factors and able to plan to cope with it in an efficiently manner.
The Essential of Digital Transformation
IT Investment through Digital Transformation to achieve the below 3 goals:
- IT Function to facilitate and increase the individual productivity at each department
- IT Network to align and collaborate among people in the organization
- Enterprise IT to align and collaborate people throughout the organization and external stakeholders such as customers, business partners, business partners and related government sector
Why XP&A is Essential
Today, most organizations still perform traditional budgeting and planning using Microsoft Excel. There are several disadvantages of this approach:
- Manual Process and Prone to Error
- Time consuming in terms of processing, consolidation, and data validation
- Unable to store large amounts of historical data as required
- Siloed and disconnected planning with no collaboration among planners
- Unable to explore in-dept insight information to identify cause and impact
- Poor data security, lack of data integration, and multiple inconsistent file versions
Extended Planning & Analytics (XP&A) overcomes the limitations of traditional planning by bring about the collaboration, linkage, and alignment of planning throughout the organization from Strategic Plan, Annual Plan, and Operational Plan with an ability to conduct continuous planning in real time. Factors that will lead to effective Integrated Planning (XP&A) includes readiness and quality of data, best practice budgeting and planning framework, integrated collaborative platform, capability of what-if and scenario planning and predictive and prescriptive analytics.
IBM Planning Analytics with Watson is the integrated single platform for Extended Planning and Analytics that provides the speed, agility, and foresight your organization needs to complete successfully. It helps organizations move beyond traditional planning limits to achieve accurate and real-time budgeting, planning, forecasting, and analytics for both financial and operation planning including sales planning, financing planning, supply chains, and other plans within a single platform to facilitate decision making to maximize business performance and to response in a quick manner with the rapid changes in the Digital Transformation era.
