The performance ideas blog

Category: Finance

  • Vienna calling!

    Harald Hornacek
    A famous host: Harald Hornacek

    Greetings from Vienna: home of the schnitzel, yummy dumplings and lot’s of amazing history. But Vienna is also the hub of many successful companies. Today is the third European IBM Finance Forum 2011. We have had a great day so far. Lot’s of attendees from the Finance & IT departments of different Austrian businesses and government agencies. The agenda here is once again packed with Finance content. And as in all the other locations, we also have some great speakers. The event in Vienna is hosted by Harald Hornacek, chief editor of the popular business magazine Succeed. The magazine is distributed by Austrian Airlines and flyers love it for its fresh and meaningful content. Harald is quite famous in the Austrian and European business community for exactly that reason. The attendees have a great time listening to his insightful comments and questions. But let me back up for a quick second. There was another Finance Forum in Zurich last week.

    HIGHLIGHTS IN ZURICH

    The Dolder Hotel, Zurich

    The Finance Forum Switzerland was held at the famous and gorgeous Dolder Grand hotel. It is situated high above the city with breathtaking views left and right. Steve Morlidge, the author of ‘Future Ready‘ delivered a refreshing keynote about best practices in forecasting. He will be speaking at many different Finance Forums across Europe this year. We also had a customer speaker from a 500 year-old company (can you believe that?): Mr.Binzegger from Orell-Fuesseli talked about their innovative use of SPSS software to develop highly accurate credit ratings for companies. We also heard Mr Wirth from Nycomed talk about how to build an effective reporting and information strategy in a global environment. The Dolder Hotel staff also served up some amazing food and coffees during the break. Great event.

    VIENNA CALLING

    Back to the event here in Vienna. It’s been a bit of a mad rush for me in the background. I left home on Sunday morning to run two Rolling Forecast workshops with close to 40 CFOs from different companies in the Middle East on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday morning we found out that one of our customer speakers in Vienna ended up calling in sick and I jumped in with a different presentation last minute. We are about to start a panel discussion between different customers and experts.

    NEXT STOP BUCHAREST

    Hopefully you will get the opportunity to join one of the IBM Finance Forum events in the next few months. As you can see, we always have great speakers, great content and also lot’s of valuable discussions. Knowledge exchange and networking is a critical part of this. My next event is scheduled for May 4th in Bucharest. To see more photos from all the different events click HERE. See you soon!

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    Vienna: Vista 3 – The location fro Finance Forum
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    Finance Forum: Many great discussions
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    Collaborative BI: A real-life scenario

  • A discussion about forecast errors

    Forecasting continues to be a hot topic. My recent interviews with Steve Morlidge continues to be very popular. Also, ‘Franz the Frog’ sparked some interesting discussions behind the scenes. Given the strong interest in these topics, I reached out to a friend who has spent a lot of time and effort driving solid forecasting processes.

    Please meet Ulrich Pilsl. He provides a different perspective. Ulrich currently works as an Interim Manager in Munich. He spent over 14 years at Softlab / BMW Group (later Cirquent / NTT Data Group). As a member of the executive board, he held different senior executive positions including CFO of a consulting subsidiary and as the Head of Controlling & Business Administration.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Forecasting is a key focus area for many finance professionals. But many organizations are struggling to obtain an objective view of the future. What are some of the key problems?

    Ulrich Pilsl: The biggest problem I see is complexity. Many companies have bloated processes that are too detailed. It simply takes too much time and people have a hard time differentiating between what is important and what is not. There is no clear focus. Also, management tends to have a hard time managing the process. My advice is to simplify and to get rid of excessive detail. More detail does not create more accurate forecasts. On the contrary: the more detail, the less accurate forecasts tend to be for the above mentioned reasons.

    Christoph Papenfuss: What is the main problem with inaccurate forecasts?

    Ulrich Pilsl: Inaccurate forecasts lead to a serious confidence problem. Shareholders don’t like surprises. It gets worse when surprises are caused by poor forecasting efforts.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Are positive and negative errors equally problematic? Let’s take a look at a typical sales or business forecast. Some people tend to create very conservative forecasts and often end up outperforming. Isn’t this better than creating a very ambitious forecast and then coming in lower?

    Ulrich Pilsl: This is an interesting but common situation. First of all, positive and negative errors are equally problematic. Both type of errors can create serious management challenges apart from the already discussed confidence problems. In regards to this specific situation, one might be tempted to say that it is a good thing for a sales person to continuously beat his or her forecast. However, this can create some serious challenges. Let’s take a look at a consulting company. Low sales forecasts indicated low resource requirements. Hiring efforts might be slowed down and the business might quickly end up in a situation where they do not have enough talent available. Business is lost. Customers might loose confidence in us as a trust-worthy business partner. I therefore strongly believe that both negative and positive errors require serious attention.

    Christoph Papenfuss: What should the Controller do to help minimize forecast errors?

    Ulrich Pilsl: The Controlling department should show some ‘tough love’. They have to challenge the departments to deliver realistic forecasts. We found that it is critical to provide suggestions and to jointly develop scenarios with the business managers. Finance basically acts as a tough but fair coach in the process. This continues in the the monthly and weekly management meetings: We openly discussed the forecast results and challenged the numbers. It is obviously the job of the Business Controller to moderate this process. Last but not least, we found that it sometimes makes sense to create top-down adjustments that reflect upside and downside risk.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Based on your experience, does it make sense to measure forecast accuracy? If yes, how often and at what level did you measure accuracy?

    Ulrich Pilsl: It depends on the organization. This reminds me of a quote by my former manager who said: “Most companies are over-controlled but under-managed.” A team that understands the value of a forecast will usually deliver solid forecasts. Measuring forecast accuracy won’t necessarily improve it. I do believe, though, that it makes sense to measure it if the organization has challenges with the forecast process. Especially in the case of a management team that does not see the value in the forecast. It might make sense to add an accuracy target to the annual objectives. We had a variable goal “internal quality”. This allowed us to substantially change the mindset of some managers. The goal was set once per year.

    Christoph Papenfuss: How do you utilize forecast accuracy measures? Should you communicate the numbers to the organization or is this something that should stay within the walls of the finance department?

    Ulrich Pilsl: In my opinion, it does make sense to communicate forecast accuracy to the management team. But it makes no sense to communicate it to the whole organization. The aim is to improve forecast quality and not to blame the management in the organization.

    Christoph Papenfuss: What can Finance do to help create a culture where people are happy to create meaningful and objective forecasts?

    Ulrich Pilsl: Finance simply has to be the role of a coach and consultant for the business. It is our role to educate and to support the business.

  • An imaginary conversation with a weather frog

    European folklore believed that frogs kept in a glass would be able to forecast the weather. People filled some water in the glass to keep the amphibian happy, and then added a small ladder. A climbing frog would indicate good weather, whereas a frog hanging out in the water would show bad weather. This belief especially stuck with people in the German speaking countries where weather forecasters are typically called ‘Weather Frogs’ (Wetterfrosch). Well, weather forecasters do one thing well: forecasting. They are the true masters and I thought that we could get some insights from one of them. It is frog migration season in Bavaria and I happened to have found one who is willing to talk to me. Please meet Franz the Frog. Franz resides in Bavaria, Germany where people recognize him as a trusted master forecaster.

     

    AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION WITH THE FROG

    Christoph: How is life as a master forecaster? Your pictures are every on the side of the roads these days. You must be pretty busy? Spring is known for its volatile weather.

    Franz the Frog: All cool here in the pond. Thanks for asking. We were quite busy up until yesterday. That’s when we finished our quarterly forecast. I am looking forward to jumping around for the next few weeks.

    Christoph: But wait a second! It’s a volatile climate out there. How can you just sit there, jump around and not forecast whenever things change?

    Franz the Frog: Dude, I hear ya’. But the big boss here in the pond decided that 2-3 forecasts per year are totally fine. Plus we have so much other stuff to do. Also, do you realize how much work we have to do to complete a forecast?

    A weather frog

    Christoph: Sorry, this was news to me.  Then tell me, why exactly is this so much work?

    Franz the Frog: Helllllooooooo!!!!! Each forecast starts with us looking at weather patterns for the past five years. Just simply gathering the data that is stored all over our pond takes us forever. Our big boss in the pond also wants us to create detailed variance reports for those years. That takes about a month. To create the actual forecast, we turn over every single leaf in our pond. And we record every little rain drop. That takes a lot of time. Get it?

    Christoph: Oh…I see…a lot of detail. But a lot of detail should result in higher accuracy right? My wife Jen complained about your reliability the other day. She claimed that she would not even ‘pack a suitcase for vacation’ using your information. Errr…please don’t shoot the messenger.

    Franz the Frog: Watch it, buddy! I will stick my tongue out here in a second. What do you expect? We get paid by our big boss in the pond. If the boss is happy, the flies are happy and we are happy. The boss decided that it’s best for us to provide a forecast that tells you guys exactly what you want to hear. Last year we saw rain coming. Your wife complained that she did not want any rain that particular week. She said:’Ahh, this stupid forecast. Rain is driving me crazy. It should be sunny!!!’. That got my big boss in the pond really upset. And guess what happened: no pay. That made our decision easy: we would eliminate a lot of pain and frustration if we simply forecast what everybody wants to hear.

    Christoph: Oh…ok. That is so not cool. Let’s change topics. What type of tools do you guys use to do your forecasts? I mean, we’re in the year 2011 so  I suspect that you guys have some cool tools…like that PC game Frogger?

    Franz the Frog: Frogger rules!!! If you like Frogger, you will be happy to hear that we are still using the same platform. No changes. Here, take a look: We have special leaves from a searose that was created in Redmond, WA’. Those leaves allow us to play with the data that we collect. The nice thing is that everybody in our pond has a ton of those searoses flying around. And the other guys love those leaves. The all create their own versions. But do me a favor and DO NOT talk to the green guy over there: he has to collect all the leaves at quarter-end. He hates his job. A bunch of my colleagues sometimes play a joke on him and swap out leaves or hide them. Others change the carefully thought-out leaf structures by ripping a holes in them or by chewing on them. You should see his face when the leaves don’t stack!!! Haha…RRRiibbitt.. Hilarious.

    Christoph: Holy tadpole! That sounds like a tough job. Can you trust the data then?

    Franz the Frog: Probably not. But hey…that’s the way the pond has been for a long time. It worked in the past it should work in the future, right? We have been around for thousands of years.  And the big boss is happy and we’re getting paid—what’s not to like?

  • Future Ready? A discussion with Steve Morlidge

    Steve Morlidge, Future Ready

    The IBM Finance Forum 2011 events have officially started in Europe. These events are designed for Finance professionals seeking to deliver stronger business insight to their organizations. Apart from being a great networking opportunity, we focus on sharing a lot of best-practice knowledge. Customers share their stories. And IBM also bring in great guest speakers like Steve Morlidge who share their tremendous knowledge in the finance area.

    Steve MorlidgeSteve Morlidge will be joining many events across Europe this year. He is a true thought-leader in the area of financial performance management. In 2010, he released a ground-breaking book called ‘Future Ready – How to Master Business Forecasting’. Together with co-author Steve Player, Steve shares a lot of valuable knowledge that he gained in over 25 years as a senior finance executive working for international companies like Unilever. He is also an active member of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT).

    Steve Morlidge and I were able to talk over the phone right before the first Finance Forum event in Zurich.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Many companies are still developing annual budgets. Is this approach outdated or is there a place for the annual budget?

    Steve Morlidge: I believe that conventional budgeting is dead, or at least very much on the way out. It takes too long, hinders responsiveness and fosters all kinds of damaging political behavior in enterprises. Companies still need to do things like setting targets, and this may still be called ‘budgeting’, but it is a long way from the traditional process many of us grew up with.

    Christoph Papenfuss: What are some of the key issues associated with the traditional forecasting process?

    Steve Morlidge: In my view most companies do not understand the difference between budgeting and forecasting. As a result, forecasting is done in too much detail, but not frequently enough. More importantly, the mindset is very often all wrong. Budgeting teaches us that gaps (between target and prognosis) are bad, whereas the primary purpose of forecasting is to detect deviations from plan so that corrective action can be taken; so unearthing such discrepancies should be positively encouraged, not punished.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Many people talk about rolling forecasts. Are rolling forecasts a viable approach?

    Steve Morlidge: They are, but too often people underestimate the task. In my book, rolling forecasts are forecasts with a consistent horizon: 12 months, 15 months or whatever. As a result, at any one time a significant chunk of the horizon may extend beyond the fiscal year end. Many of the processes upon which forecasting relies – like activity planning and so on – are anchored on the annual budgeting process so sourcing the information you need beyond the financial year end can sometimes be a challenge, unless these supporting processes are remodeled at the same time. Also, conventional annual target setting, particularly if it is tied to incentives, can distort a rolling forecast process to the point that it falls into disrepute. As a result, my advice to people is to fix the ‘in year’ forecast process first, before you tackle rolling horizons and the ‘out year’.

    Christoph Papenfuss: We all know the saying ‘You get what you measure.’ Does this apply to the forecasting process?

    Steve Morlidge: Absolutely. In fact, if you don’t measure the quality of your forecast process and, most importantly, act upon it, you have no kind of guarantee that the forecast can be relied upon. Proper measurement – closing the feedback loop – is the only thing that separates forecasting from guesswork, and in my book, 95% of corporate forecasts fall into the latter category.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Many organizations utilize spreadsheets to manager their forecasts. What role does technology play to improve the forecasting and planning processes?

    Steve Morlidge: At one level technology isn’t important at all – the main deficiency with business forecasting is the processes used and the thinking that lies behind it – not the toolset. Having said that, few companies can sustain a successful forecasting process without technology that enables them to streamline processes, provide appropriate modeling capabilities, support rapid reiteration, provide insightful measures, communicate results effectively and so on. Tools don’t make a master craftsman, but without them nothing would ever get built.

    Christoph Papenfuss: You will be delivering a keynote presentation at many IBM Finance Forum events. Can you share a few things you will be talking about?

    Steve Morlidge: My main message is that the practice of forecasting is broken, not because we don’t have the tools, but because we don’t know how to use the tools we have. I will be sharing what I have learned about mastering forecasting articulated in the form of six simple principles.

    You can find out more about Steve on his website: http://www.satoripartners.co.uk. To see a full list of the Finance Forums 2011 events and to sign up, click here.

  • Finance Forum – EMEA v1.0

    Just a quick hello from the road. It’s one of those very exciting yet extremely busy weeks. The IBM Finance Forum events finally kicked off in Europe. The first event was held on Wednesday in the beautiful town of Wiesbaden in Germany.

    Which door would you take?

    Wiesbaden is known for three things: It is the capital of Hessen, there are some natural springs that have healing effects and there is one of the few well known casinos in Germany. It is the beautiful casino building in the heart of Wiesbaden where the first Finance Forum for the season kicked off. We had a great crowd of well over 250 finance & IT professionals. I had the honor to deliver the IBM keynote. Delivering the keynote at these events is always exciting. But it is especially exciting this year: there are so many great and game-changing things to show.

    Apart from many interesting customer & IBM speakers, we also have a few really interesting external keynote speakers. In the US, David Axson will be delighting the audiences. He is a true performance management visionary and inspirational speaker. Make sure to check out his latest book called ‘The Management Myth Buster’. In Europe, Steve Morlidge (author of the book ‘Future Ready’) will be sharing interesting insights about how to improve your forecasting processes. And there are some other speakers as well. Stay tuned for updates. Check out this link to find out about all the dates.

    Below are some impressions from the day. I really hope to see many of you at our upcoming events. My personal schedule is update on this website.

    Soundcheck at 7:30am
    How cool is that? Multi-touch planning powered by TM1.
    The Kurhaus in Wiesbaden…how nice is that?

  • The great productivity leap?

    THE GREAT STAGNATION

    Last Wednesday evening while waiting for a connecting flight at Vienna airport, I came across an interesting eBook by Tyler Cowen: ‘The great stagnation“. Thanks to the iPad, I ended up reading the entire short book on the flight back home. To keep things short, Tyler Cowen looks at some of the reasons why the US economy is in a slump. One of the key points of the book is that the US (along with the majority of the Western world) have hit a technological plateau that results in slower growth, slower increases in median income and also slower productivity gains. While some of the earlier innovations such as the steam engine, refrigerators, air travel or TV had a huge impact on our overall quality of life and also our productivity, many of our recent innovations like the internet have had less of on impact (compare having or not having a fridge with having access or not having access to the Internet, or look at the options that air travel opened up for international trade).

    PRODUCTIVITY

    This blog post is not intended to be a book review, although I do highly recommend this quick and insightful read. But there is an interesting aspect that Cowen mentions: productivity gains are slowing down. We have already grabbed the ‘low-hanging fruit’ by exploiting machinery for example. This got me thinking: What about all the great technology that we have implemented in the past 20 years? Could it really be that we are not experiencing substantial productivity gains by using this technology in a smart way? The statistics apparently say no (Cowen points out that the productivity surge in the US from 2009-2010 was mostly driven by a substantial reduction in headcount). And what about Business Analytics? Shouldn’t that help us be more productive and to drive profitability?

    ARE WE REALLY PRODUCTIVE?

    To answer that question let’s take a look at a very simple example: the office of finance. A few weeks ago, I posted the results from a survey we conducted. It showed that many professionals still conduct their work by copying and pasting data into spreadsheets. And that type of activity is error-prone and takes a lot of time. As a matter of fact, many finance professionals still spend a solid part of their week loading, scrubbing & massaging data. And the resulting reports often leave a lot to be desired. They are static and not interactive. The result? A bunch of highly qualified and highly paid individuals do work that they shouldn’t be doing. Wikipedia defines labor productivity as “amount of goods and services that a worker produces in a given amount of time”. Spreadsheet maintenance hardly qualifies as a service or good, wouldn’t you say? In other words: whether we like it or not, many of us have a very low level of productivity.

    BUSINESS ANALYTICS AND PRODUCTIVITY

    Business Analytics has a huge potential to help us increase productivity. And I would argue that there is plenty of ‘low-hanging’ fruit. Think about a story that happened to me a short while ago: A CFO decided to implement a dashboard of about 50-60 KPIs (let’s not start arguing about that part…). His team was excited and started building a 65 page Powerpoint master template. The CFO was delighted. Guess what – three people spent almost two weeks per month on preparing this dashboard. Lot’s of time was wasted on extracting data from different source systems. Lot’s of time was wasted on creating Excel lookups, queries and charts. To sum it up: A big waste of time. The low hanging-fruit came in the form of a traditional BI platform. We hooked up the source systems, created the reports once, linked different charts to Powerpoint and voila: the monthly reporting book. It took one person about a day per month to check & refresh the data (there was still some manual labor involved). Consider the difference: three people for 10 days vs 1 person for 1 day. 30 man days vs 1 man day. Not bad?

    THE BEGINNING

    Based on my own experiences, I would argue that we have a huge opportunity on hand. Many companies have started Business Analytics projects but a lot projects are still highly focused and not pervasive. Once we start pushing capabilities out to a broader audience, we should be able to see significant increases in productivity. And this is not only about driving efficiency. This is also about driving effectiveness: just imagine what we could do, if we had the ability to understand our customers better. Just imagine what we could do, if we clearly understood which products are truly profitable. Business Intelligence allowed us to get to a lot of this valuable information. But I believe that we have only scratched the surface. The addition of predictive analytics to the mix offers completely new opportunities for all of us. I frequently work with some clients that have done some amazing stuff with the software. And their overall corporate performance is very impressive. I highly recommend reading the IBM CFO study which provides some great examples and insights about this topic. We just have to get started! What are you thoughts?

  • A conversation with the King of KPIs – David Parmenter

    DAVID PARMENTER

    Two winters ago, I traveled to Prague to speak at a large conference about Performance Management. As the taxi approached the hotel which was set beneath the breath-taking castle, I felt a sense of excitement: I was just minutes away from meeting a king for dinner. Not any king. Not a member of the scandal-ridden European royalty houses. No, I was about the meet a true thought-leader in the performance management community. His nickname is ‘The King of KPIs’. I am of course talking about the management guru and author, David Parmenter. David was one of the other speakers at the conference and we had the opportunity to exchange some thoughts ahead of the conference.

    For those of you who do not know David Parmenter, you are really missing out. David has authored a number of bestselling books like ‘Key Performance Indicators – developing, implementing and using winning KPIs’ and the ‘Pareto’s 80/20 Rule for Corporate Accountants’. He is also a great speaker who truly knows how to inspire his audience.

    Earlier this week, I had the great opportunity to re-connect with David Parmenter. He is about to publish a new book called ‘Winning CFOs: Implementing and Applying Better Practices’.

    Christoph Papenfuss: David, your new book focuses on providing CFOs with hands-on advice for increasing the performance of their companies. What prompted you to write this book?

    David Parmenter: I have been increasingly aware that many CFOs are not finding enough time to keep abreast of best practice.  They are spending a disproportionate amount of their time putting out fires. The “winning CFOs” book is an update of the Pareto book including additional material that a CFO would need to know in order to be a leader and business partner.

    Christoph Papenfuss: In the past, CFOs spent a lot of time on developing a detailed annual budgets. But the increasing volatility has shifted the focus away from fixed budgets towards flexible plans and forecasts. Why should CFOs consider moving towards a more flexible forecasting approach?

    David Parmenter: As I say in the book, “The standard annual planning process takes too long, is not focused on performance drivers, is not linked to strategic outcomes or critical success factors, leads to dysfunctional behavior, builds silos, and is a major barrier to success. By 2020 there will be few progressive organizations using the annual planning process to allocate resources. Quarterly rolling planning will be embedded and we will; all look back and wonder why we ever did annual planning.  As a CFO you need to be abreast of this change and ensure you are not one of the doubters who claim the “world is flat”.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Many business managers are literally afraid to submit a realistic forecast as they fear repercussions in the form of higher targets or poor performance reviews. As a result, we find that many organizations submit forecasts that mirror the plan. What can CFOs do to encourage objective and honest forecasts?

    David Parmenter: There has to be a major shift in the way we set up performance based remuneration, away from rewarding progress against a future target to measuring performance retrospectively based on relative measures. Secondly there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we forecast.  There needs to be a separation of targets from forecasts and a rule that a forecast should tell the truth and not what we want to hear.  Both of these issues are discussed, at length, in the book.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Even today many finance organizations are highly dependent on spreadsheets for compiling their monthly forecasts and reports. What is your opinion on that and how do you see this changing in the future.

    David Parmenter: Being an expert in Excel is career limiting and should be removed from your CV.  It is like applying for a job as a test driver at Ferrari and having on your CV a gold medal for driving a horse and carriage.  All accountants, including CFOs, need to have on their CV, a statement to the effect that they have a working knowledge of a forecasting software.

    Christoph Papenfuss: Many thanks for taking the time, David. We are all looking forward to reading your new book.

    You can learn more about David Parmenter and his work on his home page. His new book is scheduled for release on April 5th, 2011.

  • 3 ways to analyze and communicate Forecast Accuracy

    Analyzing Forecast Accuracy

    What’s the best kept secret in your company? Well, hopefully not your forecast accuracy numbers? Forecast accuracy should not be a calculation that happens behind closed doors. But the numbers should be communicated and analyzed to be really useful. Here are three ways you can communicate and analyze your numbers:

    • The table of shame & glory: One good way to display forecast accuracy is to collect the numbers in a heat map. Collect the numbers for different organizational units in a table and color code the values based on tolerance ranges (green = acceptable, yellow = hmmm, red = absolutely not). The advantage of this approach is that we can easily spot trends and also compare different organizational units. This type of table can also be used to motivate people to take their forecasts seriously. But once again: be cautious with putting too much pressure on forecast accuracy.

     

    • The bar chart of absolute truth: You can also simply compare forecasts and actuals in a simple bar chart. This type of format works ok for a single organizational unit. Having more than one in there makes a messy chart that is not worth looking at. The advantage here is that we can easily spot the absolute differences between the values.

    • The run chart of truth: A very popular way to display the forecast error is to visualize the percentage error in a bar chart (a so-called run chart). This is a great way to very easily spot problem areas and trends. Also, we can easily compare different organizational units.

    Those are three great ways to analyze and communicate forecast accuracy. You will probably want to experiment with all three of them. Many organizations do use these in connection. 

    Good luck with your next few forecasts! If you want to learn more, please join one of our upcoming Rolling Forecast workshops. Simply get in touch with me for an updated schedule.

    P.S.: If you want to read more about measuring forecast accuracy, I highly recommend purchasing Future Ready by Steve Morlidge and Steve Player. It is one of the best books about business forecasting. You can read an interview with Steve Morlidge on this site.

  • 4 additional things to know about Forecast Accuracy

    How is your forecast accuracy measurement project going? I hope the last post convinced you to start measuring this. But there are still some open questions. Let’s take a look at some critical items that you should consider.

    TIME SPAN

    One of the things people often get confused about is the type of forecast accuracy that they should measure. We often create forecasts for many months out. Technically speaking, I could therefore calculate 1,2,3,4,5,etc month forecast accuracy (e.g. I take a forecast value from 6 months ago and compare it to the actuals from today or I take my forecast from last month and compare it with the actuals that just came in). That’s a lot of data! Based on my own experience and discussions with many controllers, I have come to believe that most businesses should focus on a short-term measure (say 1-3 months). The reason for that is simple: the further out we look, the higher the probability for random errors (who can forecast the eruption of an Icelandic volcanoe?). Short-term accuracy is usually more important (think: adjusting production volumes, etc.) and we should have way more control over it than over longer-term accuracy. So, pick a shorter-term accuracy and start measuring it.

    FREQUENCY

    How often should we measure forecast accuracy? Every time we forecast! Why wouldn’t we? Measuring once in a while won’t help us much. The most interesting aspect of this measure is the ability to detect issues such as cultural and model problems. Just make sure to setup the models correctly and the calculations will be automatic and easy to handle. You will soon have plenty of data that will provide you with excellent insights.

    LEVEL

    Where should we measure forecast accuracy? We simply calculate this for each and every line item, correct? Hmm…better now! We already have so much data. I would suggest to look at two key dimensions to consider (in addition to time): the organizational hierarchy and the measure. The first one is simple: Somebody is responsible for the forecast. Let’s measure there. We could probably look at higher level managers (say: measure accuracy at a sales district level as opposed to each sales rep). In terms of the specific measures, experience shows that we should not go too granular. Focus on the top 2-3 key metrics of your forecast. They could be Revenue, Units, Travel Expenses for a sales forecast. The higher up we go in the hierarchy we would obviously focus on things such as Margin, Profit etc.. The general advice is to balance thirst for knowledge with practical management aspects. Generating too much data is easy. But it is the balance that turns the data into a useful management instrument. So, you should measure this at a level where people can take accountability and where the finance department doesn’t have to do too much manual follow-up.

    CAUTION

    But before I finish here, just a quick word of caution. Inaccurate forecasts can have different causes. Don’t just look at the plain numbers and start blaming people. There are always things that are out of our control (think about that unexpected event). Also, there are timing differences that occur for various reasons (think about a deal that is pushed to next month).  We need to go after those differences that are due to sloppy forecasts.

    What about analyzing and communicating forecast accuracy? More about that in the next post. Do you have any other experiences that are worth sharing?

  • Three things every controller should know about forecast accuracy

    Forecast Accuracy

    Forecast accuracy is one of those strange things: most people agree that it should be measured, yet hardly anybody does it. And the crazy thing is that it is not all that hard. If you utilize a planning tool like IBM Cognos TM1, Cognos Planning or any other package, the calculations are merely a by-product – a highly useful by-product.

    Accuracy defined

    Forecast accuracy is defined as the percentage difference between a forecast and the according actuals (in hindsight). Let’s say I forecast 100 sales units for next month but end up selling 105, we are looking at a 95% accuracy or a 5% forecast error. Pretty simple. Right?

    And why?

    Why should we measure forecast accuracy? Very simple. We invest a lot of time into the forecast process, we utilize the final forecast to make sound business decisions and the forecast should therefore be fairly accurate. But keep in mind that forecasts will never be 100% accurate for the obvious reason that we cannot predict the future. Forecast accuracy provides us with a simple measure to help us assess the quality of our forecasts. I personally believe that things need to get measured. Here are three key benefits of measuring forecast accuracy:

    1. Detect Problems with Models: Forecast accuracy can act like a sniffing dog: we can detect issues with our models. One of my clients found that their driver calculations were off resulting in a 10% higher value. A time-series analysis of their forecast error clearly revealed this after just a few months of collecting data.
    2. Surface Cultural Problems: Accuracy can also help us detect cultural problems like sandbagging. People are often afraid to submit an objective forecast to avoid potential monetary disadvantages (think about a sales manager holding back information to avoid higher sales targets). I recently met a company where a few sales guys used to bump up their sales forecast to ‘reserve’ inventory of their hot products in case they were able to sign some new deals. Well, that worked ok until the crisis hit. The company ended up with a ton of inventory sitting on the shelves. Forecast accuracy can easily help us detect these type of problems. And once we know the problem is there and we can quantify it, we can do something about it!
    3. Focus, focus, focus: Measuring and communicating forecast accuracy drives attention and focus. By publishing accuracy numbers we are effectively telling the business that they really need to pay attention to their forecast process. I have seen many cases where people submit a forecast ‘just because’. But once you notice that somebody is tracking the accuracy, you suddenly start paying more attention to the numbers that you put into the template. Nobody wants to see their name on a list of people that are submitting poor forecasts, right?

    BUT……

    Overall, forecast accuracy is a highly useful measure. But it has to be used in the right way. We cannot expect that every forecast will be 100% accurate. It just can’t be. There is too much volatility in the markets and none of us are qualified crystal-ball handlers. There is a lot more to consider, though. Over the next few days, I will share some additional tips & tricks that you might want to consider. So, start measuring forecast accuracy today!