About

Most organisations use the budget as their primary management system for establishing targets, allocating resources and reviewing performance. For organisations operating in an environment of continuous change, budgets quickly become out of date raising the question of whether they are in fact worthwhile.

Jack Welch, former Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, has called the budgeting process the “bane of corporate America”, and Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, has referred to it as a “tool of repression”.

What then is the alternative to the budget and is the rolling forecast the answer?

Rolling forecasts offer greater visibility into future operating performance. Unlike budgets, they reflect the fact that operations don’t switch off at year-end. Making good business projections isn’t as hard as it sounds. Well-established forecasting techniques, used properly, can significantly improve profits. Implementing forecasts and invigorating your planning techniques can take some of the guesswork out of operational decision making and put the focus back on optimising profitability, rather than putting out fires.

This two day in depth masterclass will allow you to effectively link strategic planning, budgeting and forecasting and has been completely updated and rewritten to meet the challenges presented by the current global financial situation.

Key learning objectives:
•   Find out how you can help eliminate the annual mind-set and current-year focus
•   Implement a continual business outlook and rolling forecast for changing business conditions
•   Reduce or eliminate the crush of budget planning at the end of each year
•   Examine best practice techniques for designing a rolling forecast
•   Find out how to identify and use business drivers in the rolling forecast
•   Ensure that your forecasting system is more flexible and linked to strategy
•   Examine the relationship between rolling forecasts and performance measurement
•   Be familiar with the critical success factors for managing implementation of a rolling forecast

Who should attend?
Strategic Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting is designed for senior level managers and team leaders who need to be kept up to date with leading edge budgeting and forecasting techniques in today’s difficult business environment.  This programme has been specifically designed for:
•   Chief Executive Officers
•   Chief Financial Officers
•   Managing Directors
•   General Managers
•   Financial Accountants & Controllers
•   Management Accountants
•   Finance Directors & Managers
•   Business Analysts & Managers
•   Budgeting Managers

Outline

Day one

Introducing strategic Planning
•   Strategic planning in organisations
•   Strategic planning models & frameworks
•   From strategic plan to business plan
•   Strategic plans and financial plans

Strategic planning and your organisation
•   Linking your strategy with vision and mission
•   Identifying strategic gaps
•   Identifying strategic risk
•   Communicating strategy across the organisation

Building financial plans
•   The traditional budget process
•   Integrating planning and budgeting
•   Workforce planning and budgeting
•   Involving managers at an operational level in the budgeting process
•   Communicating the budget process
•   Can traditional budgets work effectively in the current economic environment?

Leading edge trends in budgeting
•   Beyond budgeting
•   Activity based budgeting
•   Zero based budgeting
•   Priority based budgeting
•   Trending and benchmarking

Why change from traditional budgeting to a rolling forecast?
•   Why do so many managers dislike the traditional budgeting system?
•   Budgets versus forecasts
•   Historical versus forecasted
•   Identifying your reasons for changing to a rolling forecast
•   Determining the benefits gained from rolling forecasts

Changing the way you set targets and measure performance
•   Performance management and the rolling forecast
•   Why should performance management and forecasts be more closely linked?
•   What is the role of the budget and how does it fit within the overall context of business planning and performance management?
•   Linking an adaptive performance measurement framework to a rolling forecast
•   Successfully integrating forecasting and budgeting as essential tools for measuring performance

Examining the factors that can improve your forecasting capabilities
•   Standardising your inputs
•   Standardising your forecast methods
•   Forecasting frequency
•   Limiting biases
•   Measuring performance
•   Adopting collaborative sales and operational planning

Examining forecasting methods
•   High/low extrapolation
•   Time series decomposition
•   Regression
•   Consensus forecasts
•   Scenarios
•   Trending
•   Benchmarking

Matching rolling forecast time periods to your business cycle
•   Rolling forecast time period vs level of detail for your business needs
•   Determining the time spent on planning and budgeting
•   Relating your rolling forecast to month end

Identifying and using business drivers in the rolling forecast
•   Identifying and understanding the drivers that are specific to your organisation and processes
•   Linking rolling forecasts with the reality of past results
•   Accommodating multiple business components
•   Determining your business goals

Day two

Techniques for preparing and designing and implementing rolling forecasts
•   Accurately identifying unrealistic targets
•   Successfully integrating forecasting and budgeting as essential tools for measuring performance
•   Incorporating the variables to establish accurate indicators and benchmarks
•   Creating an adaptive performance measurement framework
•   Measuring against benchmarks rather than budgets
•   Identifying and using business drivers
•   Linking activity based budgeting (ABB) in a rolling forecast process
•   Software solutions supporting rolling forecasts

Critical success factors: Managing and controlling the implementation
•   The role of the finance function in driving the rolling forecast process
•   The key building blocks for an effective rolling forecast process
•   Obtaining early management buy-in and stakeholder acceptance of the need for change
•   Developing the business case for change, identifying costs and estimated benefits
•   Presenting the case to senior management
•   Techniques for avoiding the pitfalls associated with implementation

Linking rolling forecasts with your strategic planning
By using an annual budget with a rolling forecast, planning is reinforced as a core competency in your organisation.
•   An overview of the strategic planning framework
•   Using a rolling forecast as a management tool
•   Analysing the implications of different strategic directions on your forecasting
•   How do you resolve the variances between the actual vs the forecasted figures?
•   How do you effectively use the data to drive the strategic direction of your organisation?
•    Integrating forecasts into the strategy review
•   Strategy, plans and performance indicators
•   Linking rolling forecasts to your financial reporting
•   Strategic scorecards
•   Management reporting
•   Fast tracking month end close
•   Changing from reporting actuals to budget and replacing this with actuals to forecast
•   Complementing your financial reporting with KPI reporting

Case Study: Putting it all together
Aubrey will work through an implementation linking planning budgeting and forecasting in a major Australian organisation.

Facilitator

Aubrey Joachim , Principal Consultant, Leading Edge Change

Aubrey Joachim (Australia) FCMA; MBA; GAICD is a Chartered Management Accountant – a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants UK, and MBA and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He has over 30 years of strategic management accounting experience with global conglomerates (Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever and US Energy giant McDermott International Inc.) in South Asia, the Middle East, South East Asia and UK. Since 1993 Aubrey has been an Australian citizen and been involved in the financial services sector and Sydney Water Corporation (world’s 5^th largest water & waste water company) in senior finance roles.

 

In 2005 Aubrey set up his own boutique consulting organization – Leading Edge Change, essentially focusing on delivering public and in-house training and development workshops and seminars in finance, management accounting, strategic management, asset management, beyond budgeting & forecasting and Finance Transformation in a number of countries across the world. He runs programs in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Bahrain, Tehran, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and the UK. With this wide background experience of cultural and linguistic diversity Aubrey has the ability to appeal to any audience.

 

Aubrey also works with professional bodies and is a trainer for the Australian Institute of Company Directors, as well as conducting professional development courses for CIMA in the UK, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, UAE, Southern Africa, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia, The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, CPA Australia, MIA in Malaysia and the Institute of CPA’s Singapore (ICPAS) and the Honk Kong Institute of CPA’s.

 

Aubrey is consistently rated very highly by his various audiences globally and is a presenter in high demand.

 

He writes on technical and managerial topics and has been published in professional journals including CIMA and the National Accountant (Australia). He has also been contributing a monthly article on Management Accounting in the Charter Magazine – the monthly journal of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Australia.

 

In 2009/2010, Aubrey became the first non-British/ Irish global President of the prestigious global management accounting body CIMA – the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants UK in its 90 year history. This global position gave him significant exposure and public profile. He has been written about and provided opinion pieces that have been published in various countries. In his CIMA presiddential role he has presented on Finance Transformation to global multinationals such as Shell, Ford, Rolls Royce, Unilever, Barclays Bank, IBM, Time Warner and Swire Coca Cola.

Aubrey Joachim is also facilitating:

• Asset Economics, Lifecycle & Costing Management
• Budgeting and Forecasting for the Public Sector
• Lean Finance & Finance Transformation

In-house Training