Today’s CFOs are facing more pressure than ever before to make better, faster decisions for their business. They are expected to be in tune with the market and the organization to create a strong investment strategy.
But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that even the best-laid business plans can be disrupted by unforeseen shocks and the uncertainty that ensues. Organizations, and especially CFOs, need to learn how to respond to a shifting environment that improved public health will not immediately remedy.
To continue to optimize their actions in the face of uncertainty, CFOs need to leverage a prescriptive analytics platform. Taking predictive capabilities a step further, this analysis helps CFOs integrate their planning and evaluate the impact of company investments. Only then do they have a hand in shaping outcomes at all levels of the organization rather than just reporting them.
Prescriptive Analytics Shorten Planning Cycles
CFOs must be forward-thinking. An investment decision they make today should profit the organization in the future — whether that’s right around the corner or a year ahead.
Prescriptive analytics gives CFOs the ability to evaluate the impact of the company’s investments based on their likelihood of delivering the CEO’s revenue goals. With these actionable insights, CFOs are able to accelerate their planning cycle from annual to weekly. A shortened planning cycle means CFOs are confident that their investment decisions capitalize on current market conditions while reaching their revenue targets.
This isn’t the only benefit of prescriptive analytics. Others include:
• Automating redundant and time-consuming manual processes.
• Integrating cross-functional teams for better collaboration.
• Providing a comprehensive view of the market.
By leveraging prescriptive analytics, CFOs are presented with a roadmap to reach their revenue goal to make their forecasts come true. They are able to evaluate alternative strategies and their tradeoffs in terms of costs and likely revenue delivered. Not only does this streamline their decision-making, but it also helps them improve their financial plans and close any gaps to ensure their revenue targets are met — or better yet, exceeded.
Presenting this concrete information on the top-line and bottom-line impacts of different strategies to other executives makes CFOs a reliable driver of change and an active participant in strategic decision-making.
The Foundation for Prescriptive Success
Utilizing prescriptive analytics may seem like something out of science fiction. After all, if these capabilities exist, why wouldn’t they be more commonplace among executives?
The answer comes down to understanding what it takes for prescriptive success. Prescriptive analytics is not elusive, nor is a prescriptive platform difficult to deploy when you have the right tools in place.
Prescriptive analytics is simply an extension of the descriptive, diagnostic and predictive data-analysis solutions many CFOs already use. Prescriptive analytics uses data on sales and business investments that CFOs already track in their income statements along with other relevant industry data and domain expertise. The ability to describe and understand what already happened in the market and predict new trends gives financial experts an almost complete view to guide their decisions. Prescriptive analytics integrates available information into a platform that enables the testing of what-if strategies. Investing in this final piece of the puzzle that provides CFOs with the complete picture of the market is necessary to improve their efficacy.
CFOs already have the foundation they need to leverage a comprehensive analytics platform to ensure investments and allocations deliver the organization’s financial goals. Software and their current teams provide the missing pieces to enable the capability.
Gain Data Science Capabilities Without Hiring
Data science and analytics go hand in hand. For decades, harnessing the power of analytics required hiring teams of data scientists — but not with Concentric.
With the Concentric prescriptive analytics platform, CFOs utilize software and their existing teams to drive an automated process that delivers the integration of data, advanced analytics, and market insights that complement the tools that they already have in place. This off-the-shelf analytics software platform is easy to deploy, so CFOs experience the benefits of prescription quickly.
The Concentric prescriptive analytics platform provides forecasts with 95% accuracy and measurable ROI of 7x+. Start your journey to more effective decision-making today with the faster, lower cost, and collaborative tools that drive financial value.
