8NOVEMBER 2023OPINIONIN MYBy Tunc Tezel, VP Group FP&A, OntexFP&A VS FINANCE BUSINESS PARTNERLately we were having a debate about the roles and titles of business supporting finance managers whether to call them FP&A Managers or Finance Business Partners... Sounds philosophical, but in a way we started to expect more and more from our finance colleagues and start seeing them as one-stop-shop where GM's or Commercial Directors seek answers to all of their questions.Sounds sexy or appealing right, but when it comes to delivering the answers or results at times, it is overwhelming! In the never ending world of automation, integrating systems, bringing in BOTs replacing FTE employees, it is getting more and more demanding from the ones who are trying to tell stories about the numbers & bringing them to life. Storytelling has always been the compelling part of the FP&A job and becoming more and more important in a data driven world becoming a skill differentiator.In the early 00's, in simple terms, the job of FP&A managers were to collect volumes, prices and costs and come up with analysis on the P&L. We were to do analysis on promotions, value creation from Gross to Net analysis with very limited data either from market research agencies such as Nielsen/Kantar or again very limited EPOS data from some of the retailer partners. So the incoming data was very limited, with time lag and the world was simpler. Even the consumers and sales channels were not as sophisticated. It was easier to estimate the consumption, trends and financials even under hyperinflationary environment in Developing Markets. It was predominantly one in Excel for analysis and graphs and some basic dashboards were introduced for KPI monitoring. Tunc Tezel
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