How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner

AFP®
GUIDE TO
How FP&A Can Become
a Better Business Partner
FP&A Guide Series
Issue 13
Underwritten by

AFP®
GUIDE TO
How FP&A Can Become
a Better Business Partner
FP&A Guide Series
Contents
Why a business/FP&A partnership is so crucial 1
Example 1 Partnership in Action: Launching a new product 2
BUILDING BLOCK 1: Building a collaborative relationship 3
Sidebar: Partnership Requires New Skills 3
Example 2 Partnership in Action: Working with the supply chain 4
Case Study 1: Everbridge 5
BUILDING BLOCK 2: Putting in place technology enablers 6
Example 3 Partnership in Action: Reviewing the warranty department 8
BUILDING BLOCK 3: Aligning the organizational structure 9
Example 4 Partnership in Action: Understanding product profitability 9
Sidebar: Six Steps for Developing the New FP&A Model 10
Case Study 2: Oracle 11
Case Study 3: Maersk Line 13
Conclusion 14
Underwritten by

Executive Summary
How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner
FP&A is increasingly recognized as a true business partner. As the
finance director for a defense contractor put it: “If we’re not helping
to facilitate the conversation with the business, we’re not doing
our job.”
In its expanded role, FP&A is helping the business to improve
planning and to better align with its organizational strategy. It
increasingly automates basic activities to free up staff’s time, allowing
them to focus on high-level tasks. And, there is increased reliance on
access to data and new technologies to run more advanced analytics,
thereby helping to provide the business and its senior management
with the insight and foresight to enhance enterprise profitability.
Collaboration with the business is absolutely key to the success of
FP&A and the organization. “It’s about partnering with the business,
enabling people to think beyond their functional silos and working
together effectively to have a meaningful impact on the company’s
performance,” said Ketan Goculdas, director of FP&A at Sparta
Systems, Inc. “FP&A plays an absolutely critical role within the
company; it’s a strategic partner to the CFO and the executive
leadership team. You need to be able to influence both tactical and
strategic decisions and collaborate with functional leaders to
objectively assess the financial implications of proposed actions.”
Investment in technology is liberating FP&A professionals to work
more closely with operations. It’s also putting new tools in the hands
of finance and business units to run advanced analytics and ask
probative questions. Meanwhile, changes to finance’s organizational
structure are creating an alignment between its new partnering role
and the needs of business leadership.
To construct a strong business partnership, FP&A needs three
building blocks.
1. A strong, collaborative relationship with operations.
2. Technology that cuts across departmental silos.
3. Better alignment of finance’s organizational structure.
This guide examines each of the three, provides examples of
successful partnering cases, full case studies, and a how-to checklist
to help practitioners improve their own business partnering initiatives.

www.AFPonline.org ©2016 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved 1
AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner
The first thing FP&A must do is to embrace its man-
date as a business advisor and valued partner. According
to Steve Elliott, director at The Hackett Group’s EPM
Transformation Practice, business partnering has always
been a key FP&A role. However, more recently it’s been
enhanced by technological advances and the unrelenting
pressure on business to do more with fewer resources.
“The availability of data, new analytics tools and
technologies have improved over time,” Elliott said. At
the same time, “The role of FP&A is evolving from one
of planning and reporting, or being a gatekeeper for
financial information, to that of a partner to the busi-
ness. FP&A is being responsive to the changing needs
of the business; it has to keep pace to stay relevant and
maintain its seat at the decision-making table.”
According to Elliott, the role of FP&A is changing to
encompass higher-value services. “The partnering func-
tion is mirroring the business structure and the business
needs; increased pressure on the business has translated
into greater pressure on FP&A,” he said.
FP&A experts and practitioners list the following
reasons as to why FP&A’s partnership with the business
is crucial to organizational performance.
1. Provide actionable information. William Howell,
FP&A, is the FP&A manager for payroll and HR
technology provider, Ceridian UK. According to
Howell, it’s difficult for functional leaders to make
the right decisions without having the right financial
information. “At the heart of it, there’s delivering
and unleashing the potential of finance profession-
als to hold up a mirror to the business and become
a partner against whom they can bounce ideas.
FP&A has shifted from being the people who dealt
with the data. It’s now about providing concise and
actionable information to the business to help them
direct their energy and resources appropriately.”
2. Improve the forecast. According to Brian Fink, a
finance consultant, finance and the business must
collaborate during the financial forecasting process
because even a small miss could result in a dramat-
ic and direct hit to the stock price. “To be effective
and produce a reliable forecast, you have to be very
knowledgeable about the different functional areas
of the business,” Fink said. “The idea is to not
just accept the forecast but be able to challenge,
collaborate on and understand the numbers at a
detailed level.”
“Successful collaboration is key and an impor-
tant factor for meaningful planning,” agreed Jokim
Pluijmers, head of planning & control, global
operations & IT at ING Bank in Amsterdam.
“Without business input, planning and forecast-
ing can hardly be accurate. Any business economic
forecast needs to be confronted with business-spe-
cific insights to enhance the numbers. Even more
important than the forecast is mutual commitment
to meet any predicted or agreed target,” he said.
3. Trigger a two-way flow of information.
“I sometimes refer to FP&A as the financial heart
of the company,” says Carl Seidman, a management
consultant and trainer. FP&A pumps information
through arteries to the other departments; it is
FP&A that communicates the importance of
numbers and metrics and receives information
back from the departments through the veins
about what’s important to them. “Without that
constant two-way flow of information, organizations
cannot be as effective,” he said.
4. Provide real-time analytics. According to Rudy
Garcia, assistant vice president of financial plan-
ning & analysis at Sizmek, it’s about looking at
business processes and FP&A’s own process and
figuring out what needs to improve in order to
understand the company’s position in real time. At
Sizmek, FP&A is working with the sales organiza-
tion to revamp the way the company creates its
rate card. “We have hundreds of those,” Garcia
said. FP&A is working to standardize and insert
greater discipline into the process with manage-
ment providing direction and guidance depending
on volume and length of business.
5. Align everyone around the strategy. “The other
piece related to better collaboration is ensuring
that functions are attuned to what’s going on
in other parts of the business,” said Scott Page,
director of FP&A at YP. Sitting at the business’
headquarters, “I can see changes in profitability
or revenue across the business and can share that
Why a business/FP&A partnership is so crucial

2 ©2016 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved www.AFPonline.org
insight with the business and rationalize it, making
sure that overall each function is in lockstep with
the business strategy,” he said.
6. Ask the tough questions. Brian Sullivan, an inde-
pendent FP&A consultant and former practitioner,
sees finance, IT and HR as an “executive team.”
“That team’s role is to advise and support the busi-
ness manager or ‘CFO’ of that business function,
region or segment. This means finance, as the
business CFO, gets to ask challenging questions,
provide analytics and show alternative courses of
action. Added Bryan Lapidus, FP&A, associate
director of CFO Advisory Services at Allegiance
Advisory Group, “Ultimately, when you under-
stand the business, you can ask better questions.”
7. Driving accountability. According to Ian Charles,
CFO of Host Analytics, “Becoming a true busi-
ness partner is also a way of driving accountability
throughout the business. Otherwise, there will be
a disconnect between different groups who are
responsible for different parts of the plan.”
8. Put numbers in context. While operators in the
field see a lot of metrics every day, according to
Casey James, FP&A, senior manager of FP&A at the
Cheesecake Factory, “It’s FP&A’s role to turn that data
into actionable information and put information in
context, for example what’s happening in the industry
or the macroeconomic environment,” she said. “As
new self-service tools put more information in the
hands of the business, finance needs to play an ever
greater role to help business leaders understand what
those model outputs really mean.”
Nick Pennell, operation lead of the global
EPM Centre of Excellence at KPMG UK agreed:
“FP&A’s role requires translating the targets of the
organization into the financial forecast and plan.
You can ask for the results from the business unit,
but you won’t get the data or fully understand
it without tight collaboration with the business
unit.” To be effective, FP&A needs to ask the ‘why’
questions and understand the business problems.
“Otherwise, you won’t get the clarity of data,
and be able to interpret and set realistic targets.
To build that relationship, you have to have deep
knowledge of the operations,” he said.
Example 1 | Partnership in Action:
Launching a new product
One FP&A professional tells the story of
having worked at a company that developed
a new product to about 70 percent
completion. It sold 200,000 units in the
first four months of the first half year — way
below expectations. FP&A took charge in
the last two months of the first half year,
bringing together a cross-functional team,
including sales leaders, product development,
operations and the lead developer to figure
out what was going on.
“We started by defining the business
goals, and together came up with a plan
of how to achieve those dollars and what
it meant for each department,” said the
finance professional. FP&A then developed
a dashboard to track progress, identify the
open items, and create the agenda for each
follow-up meeting to track the status of the
project. Their efforts paid off: In the second
half year, the company sold 1.2 million units.
It’s hard to tell exactly how much of it was
due to the active intervention by FP&A,
but this executive estimates that had FP&A
not gotten involved, the company probably
would have sold 600,000 units.
Nearly all of the metrics on the dashboard
were operational, e.g., what functionalities
were missing? What was the priority for
adjusting those and over what timeframe?
“Finance was leading it and asking the
questions. Ultimately, the goal is to meet the
budget; however, we couldn’t just sit and
say, ‘you’re not meeting your numbers.’ We
had to lay out a path of how to get there.”

Next, ensure there is transparency and integ-
rity in the process. “Once you establish trust and
transparency, the decisions, recommendations, and
outcomes become much more acceptable to the
audience,” said Goculdas.
How FP&A builds trust will, of course, depend
on the size of the organization, according to Nick
Pennell. In an average-sized company, it’s incum-
bent upon FP&A to ensure the businesses have a
“go-to” FP&A contact, either embedded within the
BU or assigned within the FP&A team. This allows
the business and the FP&A professional to develop
a tight relationship. “The relationship is not with a
function, it’s with a person,” he explained. Pennell
recommends regular meetings to demonstrate that
finance is taking the time to invest in solving the
business problems.
• Communicate. “Communication is at the heart of
being able to build that credibility and achieve suc-
cessful partnership,” said Howell. FP&A needs to
see and know other parts of the business. And even
if it can’t visit in person, it should meet with the
business executives when they visit the headquar-
ters. “Don’t expect the business leaders to be mind
The first foundational piece in becoming a better busi-
ness partner is creating the right relationship between
business and finance — a lot of which depends on
the interpersonal and business skills of the FP&A
team. According to Pluijmers, the real value of finance
arises from having the right social skills with a focus
on interpersonal interaction, as well as an interest in
understanding and working with the business. It might
even involve staff with a different background than
finance (e.g., marketing and sales, or IT). An indepen-
dent mindset is also important, because even though
FP&A works in collaboration with the business, it must
continue to ask questions and challenge its partners.
“The critical skills are soft ones,” said James, “com-
munication, the ability to listen, present and interpret
numbers.” Plus, she said, “You can’t be overly sensitive.”
Often, FP&A will suggest a solution, and the business
will choose to go its own way. Weeks or months later,
the business may be ready for FP&A’s idea. Saying “I
told you so” is not the right approach. “You need to say,
‘okay, let’s move forward in a positive direction.’”
Jeroen Delsman, senior director of finance of
MOCVD BU at Veeco calls this quality “persistency.”
“You can’t give up easily. Today’s idea may be rejected,
but it can be tomorrow’s or next week’s.”
“You have to have intellectual flexibility, draw on
multiple concepts, and bring it to a central point,”
added Richard St. Francis, vice president of FP&A at
Parexel. “You also have to be able to build confidence
in others.” According to St. Francis, FP&A needs to be
able to transition from being analytical to visionary in
order to aid in creating a story. “If you can’t tell a story,
then you don’t understand the business,” he said.
Tips on building a successful relationship
There are steps professionals can take to help build a
strong relationship with business leaders.
• Develop trust. “Building trust is the first step in es-
tablishing effective collaboration,” Goculdas said. To
make this happen, “credibility has to be established
at the outset,” he said. “Do what you say you will,
and follow through on your commitments.”
BUILDING BLOCK 1:
Building a collaborative relationship Partnership Requires New Skills
Working closely with operations requires a
new skill set for FP&A. Professionals need to:
1. Develop high-level communication skills.
2. Enhance their business acumen
(or have business experience).
3. Possess advanced analytics capabilities.
4. Have an independent mindset and show
critical thinking skills.
5. Be persistent and have a thick skin.
6. Exhibit intellectual flexibility.
7. Be able to tell stories about numbers.
8. Have strong project-management skills.
9. Show initiative.
10. Be assertive and ask the tough questions.

readers,” said Howell. It’s important for FP&A to
clearly explain the budget and the plan in
jargon-free terms.
• Provide timely responses. According to James,
FP&A shouldn’t let requests linger in a queue.
“Get it done in a timely manner, and don’t just
answer the question but add something to it, a dif-
ferent perspective, information that’s actionable, an
insight.” It’s also important to be visible and get to
know people on a more personal level.
• Combine formal with informal processes. At
Ceridian, Howell is trying to push his team to
make more informal contact with the teams across
the business so as to better understand what they
do, their resources, and key business drivers. “We
need to understand what makes their business tick
and what are the pieces they require in order to
make good decisions,” Howell said.
According to Jenny Okonkwo, FP&A, founder
of Transform Consulting, “You learn most of your
information in informal settings, not business
review meetings,” she said. “The trick is to make
sure you are in a position to have these offline con-
versations and business managers trust you to be
discreet.” Many business managers won’t reveal their
concerns during gatherings with management. She
advised FP&A to “embrace the formal and infor-
mal agenda and treat them with equal respect.”
• Put operational performance in financial context.
According to YP’s Page, it starts with having a good
operational model and being able to help connect
the operational elements to the financial accounts.
“Functional leaders may not realize they’ve gotten
out of step,” Page said. “The key is framing the
analysis in the proper way so as to allow people to
proactively look at their organization within the
proper context.”
• Spend time in the business. “By working in the busi-
ness, you find out what are the exceptions to the rule,”
said Ashley Merritt, FP&A, former practitioner and
now an independent consultant. “Always make a point
of visiting with the business to talk about finance and
the business and the challenges it faces.
Added Sullivan: “When you sit in the business,
you hear the conversations, see the activity and
witness how things are planned so you can ask
your questions early on.”
• Be accurate and relevant. Make sure that the infor-
mation FP&A provides the business is accurate and
timely. “It must also be data provided in a contextually
relevant manner,” said Rob Hull, CEO of Adaptive
Insights. “The finance team member has to have the
ability to sit with the business manager and provide
both operational and financial data in a way that dem-
onstrates how it’s relevant to that manager’s business.”
Example 2 | Partnership in Action:
Working with the supply chain
Delsman and his team at Veeco worked hand
in hand with manufacturing and the supply
chain. “Finance is good at analyzing cost center
spending and production variances, and tradi-
tionally has not been as involved in materials
cost analysis,” Delsman said. That’s because the
cost is often “buried” in the agreements with
suppliers — yet it makes up the largest share of
overall spend.
“We have focused on making sure we
understand our cost model,” said Delsman,
“so we are not overcharged by contract man-
ufacturers.” FP&A worked with the business
to review each contract for hours charged
and realized cost reductions.” It was a very
worthwhile effort. From a finance/budget
standpoint, the company was on track. It was
meeting its forecast.
“Before we were involved in the supply chain
we thought we had a good forecast,” said
Delsman. “But [what we learned is that] the
forecast was for the wrong amount. We were
forecasting to overpay. That disconnect has
been resolved.”
In this case, “FP&A was very proactive. The
key was working with the business on under-
standing the deal structure, conducting a
pricing review and looking at the agreements.
Your role as a business finance person is
challenging things that come across your desk.”

Case Study 1: Everbridge
Patrick Brickley is the vice president of finance
at Everbridge, at fast-growing cloud-based
technology company specializing in emergency
wireless communications. Brickley joined
Everbridge from Google, where he partnered
with project and product managers to create a
business plan and ensure their projects stayed
on track and delivered results.
At Everbridge, FP&A is focused on helping
the company to deliver on its growth vision, and
identifying investment opportunities and risks to
the plan. “It gets pretty granular working across
the business, working backward from the
long-term plan into what needs to happen
quarter by quarter,” Brickley said. FP&A partners
with the CFO, the CEO and the business
function “to make sure we have a clear path to
realize the company’s long-term vision.”
“FP&A figures out what’s working, what’s not,
and how to make it work. For example, if gross
margins were expected to be X but we see Y, we
ask why,” he said. “Or, if we see signs of weak-
ness in a future quarter’s sales pipeline, then we
partner with sales and marketing to understand
the causes and to identify sales behavior shifts
and/or marketing investments to address the
gap before revenue is negatively impacted.”
“Joining Google in 2011 was an eye-opening
experience for me,” recalled Brickley. At Google,
the FP&A professional played a dual role: He
drove the business plan toward success while
providing visibility into the project for senior
management. “I was trying to step back and see
how the business is run,” he said.
According to Brickley, that function is par-
ticularly important in fast-growing companies
where business dreams big. It’s FP&A’s role to
translate that vision into a functional five-year
top-line and bottom-line plan, including all the
resources in between and with consideration of
the market, competition, what customers want,
and the skill set necessary to achieve those out-
comes. “While most of the time business leaders
know the answers, it is FP&A’s role to ask the
questions,” he said, “especially forward-thinking
questions, because a lot of times business leaders
get mired in solving for ‘now.’”
While at Google, Brickley was quasi-embedded
in the business. His reporting line remained in
finance, and at least once a week he’d meet
with his finance colleagues to talk about the
multitude of projects, what problems others on
the team were facing, and how they were
addressing these issues. “I could take back
some of these solutions to inform my own
suggestions,” he said. He considers this matrix
organizational structure a great recipe for
success for two reasons:
1. Being part of finance gave Brickley insight
into the issues that were popping up with
other business projects, so new ideas could
be quickly implemented across projects.
2. Staying within finance helps mitigate the
“Stockholm syndrome” effect. “It’s easier to
maintain an objective point of view, because
you really need to maintain that advocacy
role and push hard to drive the business to
think about what may work,” he said.
Developing the right mindset
To be successful in this role, FP&A has to have
a particular set of skills, according to Brickley. “In
my experience, it is very much about influencing
without any real authority,” he said. “To build that
partnership, FP&A needs to be to be willing to
come out of its comfort zone. You have to have
all these potentially uncomfortable conversa-
tions and understand how the business and other
functions work. FP&A has to be willing to try new
things, have leadership skills and be willing to
speak up.”
In order to assert its influence, FP&A needs
to gain the trust of the business’ leadership.
One way FP&A can gain credibility with busi-
ness leaders is to demonstrate their skills and
knowledge. They can do this by solving known
challenges or by asking pointed questions.
“They can push back for details, and drill further

BUILDING BLOCK 2:
Putting in place technology enablers
The importance of technology in enabling business
partnering includes two aspects:
1. First, investment in systems automates repetitive
processes and reroutes the flow of information to
free up FP&A’s time to focus on strategic tasks.
2. Second, new technologies bring operational and
financial information into a single view and democ-
ratize analytics capabilities by putting self-service
tools in the hands of business and functions, so that
business and finance can have richer conversations
about the impact of operational decisions on
financial results and vice versa.
AFP’s 2016 FP&A benchmarking survey found a
strong correlation between the percentage of the overall
FP&A budget that organizations spend on systems and
the efficiency of their finance process. Companies that
spent more on technology had significantly shorter cycle
times and spent less time on grunt work. For example,
companies that invested under 10 percent of their
FP&A budgets in systems spent 384 FTE days col-
lecting and processing data, compared to less than half
that amount of time at companies that invested 20-49
percent. Cycle times were also significantly reduced for
budgeting and forecasting.
Mean Median
Less than 10% of Systems
Annual budget 89.98 90
Financial forecast 23.04 15
Rolling forecast 15.64 8
10%-19% of Systems

20%-49% of Systems

50%-79% of Systems

Annual budget 15 15
Financial forecast 3 3
Rolling forecast 2 2
Average Cycle Time – FTE Days
and show that they are familiar with the details,”
said Brickley. In a recent conversation he had
with his CEO, familiarity with details clearly sent
the business leaders the message that he knew
sometimes more about their business than they
did, and changed the way they viewed his input.
Another strategy is to admit that you don’t
know anything about the business, and ask
the business leaders to teach you about it.
That helps them to let their guard down — and
to build trust. Instead of getting into an ego
battle over who knows more, which only leads
to a power struggle and mutual suspicion, “you
establish a collaborative environment. Of course,
you have to demonstrate that you learn quickly,
and will be able to add value quickly. And don’t
ask the same question twice,” advised Brickley.
At Google, each FP&A professional was offi-
cially teamed with a business/product manager.
At Everbridge, the relationship is more ad hoc,
but it’s evolving. FP&A is leveraging the com-
pany’s metrics-driven culture. Each area has its
own financial and operational goal, and FP&A
offers its services as someone who can help
them to meet those goals. “It’s an informal and
proactive process,” Brickley said. “As we dig in
and learn the questions to ask, and produce
analysis and the next set of questions, we’re
demonstrating value and building credibility.
Eventually, Brickley predicts, working with
FP&A will become second nature.
Source: AFP 2016 FP&A Benchmarking Survey

both worlds [operations and finance],” she said. “In
this new world of integrated planning, you’re con-
stantly staying in touch with the supply-chain teams,
the sales operations teams, the HR teams, etc. to see if
there are kinks in the flow; finance has to be proactive,
paying attention to the links instead of waiting for the
impact of those kinks to come to them. It’s an opportu-
nity for FP&A to take on more responsibility.”
This sort of collaboration is not possible when ev-
eryone works within his or her own technology island.
“You can’t be effective working with separate models
built in spreadsheets, but have to work within an
integrated enterprise model,” Charles said. The
solution may sit in finance, but it must extend to
other departments so that changes to business drivers
are incorporated in real time into the financial plan
and analysis.
The technological manifestation of business partner-
ship is integrated planning; it’s the synching up of the
business and financial flows into one view accessible
to business and finance and the breakdown of old
departmental silos so everyone can feed the same data
into their models. Finance, business, and management
need to see down to the transaction level how changing
business drivers affect financial performance today and
in the future.
According to Dean Sorensen, an independent con-
sultant and integrating planning expert, the approach
helps companies handle the growing complexity of
their businesses. As complexity rises, integration
provides the means to accomplish objectives that
become increasingly difficult to support with
fragmented processes and systems. Integrated
planning gives companies a real advantage.
• It provides greater insight into financial and
operational risks.
• It optimizes operating performance, by breaking
down functional silos.
• It optimizes investment ROI, by managing risks
associated with project cash flows.
• It cascades realistic and adequately funded targets.
• It helps them to respond quickly to change.
The primary reason integrated planning is become
more of a household term is the changing role of the
CFO. “The CFO is becoming more important,” said
When FP&A professionals close the budget faster
and spend less time on low-value work, they have more
time to spend on strategic activities such as business
partnering. That’s clearly where CFOs want FP&A
teams to spend their time. A survey of CFOs by Adap-
tive Insights, published in August 2016, revealed that
CFOs expect their finance organizations to double the
amount of time they spend on strategic tasks by 2020.
The fact that marketing and sales have access to
more advanced analytics doesn’t mean finance is no
longer necessary. According to Tony Levy, business unit
executive at IBM Analytics Software, only finance is in
the position to show how changes in operational driv-
ers will affect future financial performance and to do
the proper investment analysis for key initiatives.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide within
the function,” Elliott said. “Information is visible
across the enterprise and to finance, enabling better
collaboration.” Ultimately, said Elliott, “FP&A needs
to find new ways to help the organization grow by ac-
celerating the decision-making process.”
“Ten or even five years ago, we would need IT to
design our dashboards,” said one finance director.
“Today, a savvy analyst can use BI tools from
Microsoft and Tableau to build really smart dashboards
that can help digest the information and thus become
an effective partner to the business; we’re investing
heavily in that arena and leveraging big data technol-
ogy to help us.”
According to Meredith Hobik, product line leader of
finance at Anaplan, today’s finance departments face a
very different set of challenges. “You have to straddle
FTE Days Spent on Collecting and Manipulating
Budget Data by Investment in Technology
Investment in
Technology as Mean Median
Percent of FTE FTE
Total Budget Days Days
Less than 10% 384.16 60
10%-19% 153.75 30
20% - 49% 62.29 14
Source: AFP 2016 FP&A Benchmarking Survey

Pras Chatterjee, senior director of product market-
ing, enterprise performance management at SAP. In
the past, the budget and planning were done at a
centralized, high level only. Today, finance functions
are embedded in regional and functional entities and
each creates its own budget. According to Chatterjee,
Integrated Planning is the glue that holds all these
together, allowing senior finance leaders to have a
line of sight into various budgets and allowing
budget owners to make sure they’re all looking at the
same numbers. “Technology brings all these plans
together,” he said.
Many of the old EPM tools were built around
departmental silos. New tools mesh together
operational and financial data and feed driver-based
models that produce intelligence on how changes at
the operational level affect (today) and will affect
(tomorrow and next quarter) material financial
metrics. To become a true business partner, finance
needs to see information all the way down to the
factory floor and vice versa.
Charles offers a simple example: “If you ask the
head of sales what’s the impact of a growth of
X percent in sales on EPS, a tool that separates
operational from financial data cannot provide the
answer.” He added: “The sales executive can run a
waterfall model, but he or she can’t take into account
all the factors necessary to take it all the way to the
EPS impact. It’s only when you combine the
financial and operational streams of data that you
can ask and answer questions that require more
complex calculations.”
According to Hobik, companies need tools that
provide users with a collaborative planning platform to
share the same metadata, hierarchies, versions,
and formulas. These tools “can pass the information
between finance, HR, sales and marketing on the same
cadence. Integrated planning means everyone speaks
the same language, across finance and the business.”
“Now there’s a real opportunity to integrate the
S&OP process with the finance process and create a
strong linkage between the budget and the forecast
and operational information flows in real time,”
said Elliott.
Example 3 | Partnering in Action:
Reviewing the warranty department
During a finance project with a transporta-
tion company, Jenny Okonkwo of Transform
Consulting was asked to review the company’s
warranty department. The budget for the
entire year was $1 million. Six months into the
year, the department was already at $800,000.
The question finance needed to solve was why
the costs were running so high.
Okonkwo and the finance team drilled down
to look at both sales and warranty items by
region (warehouse location) and by customer.
The ratio between items sold and items issued
under warranty for products in the same cat-
egory was revealing. She quickly found that
in some regions, sales staff was not following
established company procedures regard-
ing customer complaints on or after product
delivery. Instead of taking the items through
the formal documented process to determine
whether they needed to be fixed or replaced,
they replaced them right away with new prod-
uct. This was a major warranty cost driver that
had a significant impact on the product cost
of sales and gross margin.
The implementation of a new process
streamlined how the customer account man-
agers dealt with returned items. Re-directing
the customers through to customer service
triggered a set of actions to be performed
by QA. The process changes drove a deeper
company-wide investigation to figure out
what caused the return and worked to fix the
problem at the source, and sales reversed its
decision to significantly increase a warranty
incentive program by a five-figure sum with
one of its major customers.
“This was called out by finance,” Okonkwo
said. “We told the story in an objective and vi-
sual way and triggered a major change across
the company at the operational/
business level.”

BUILDING BLOCK 3:
Aligning the organizational structure
Investment in technology is one telltale sign of whether
senior finance executives are enabling FP&A to execute
on its business partnering mandate. The other is whether
finance has invested in building an organization that
puts the right people in the right place. Ultimately, “if
you say something is important you, you’ve got to look
at the wallet. You can’t just tell people that something is
important and ask them to do it. Management needs to
back it up,” said Melanie Jimmerson, finance director
at Premera Blue Cross, a healthcare company in Seattle.
Finance is on an evolutionary path to building the
optimized organizational structure to support
business partnering and a lot depends on size and
budget. Right now, there are four models, in ascending
order of maturity:
• Level 1: HQ staff perform business support on an
ad-hoc basis. In this foundational case, there’s a
centralized FP&A function that is responsible for
all FP&A activities, including budgeting, forecast-
ing and planning that is also providing support to
the business when necessary. The team has limited
capacity to provide decision-making support and
advanced analytics to operations.
• Level 2: Finance assigns staff to specific business
units. Higher on the curve are companies with
HQ staff who are specifically assigned to particular
business units. This allows business leaders to
develop closer relationship with their FP&A
partners, while enabling the FP&A staff to develop
stronger business acumen by learning more about
the businesses they support.
• Level 3: Finance embeds FP&A staff in the
business units. In this more highly evolved
organizational structure, HQ FP&A staff is
complemented by embedded FP&A practitioners
who are co-located in the business units to support
rapid decision-making, develop strong ties with
business leaders and true business knowledge
and expertise.
• Level 4: Finance deploys local business consulting
teams. Finally, at the leading edge of business
partnering are companies that split finance into
three separate organizations: a shared service center
(SSC) that handles day to day activities, a
centralized business support group or Center of
Excellence (CoE) that performs standardized and
ad-hoc analytics, and a separate front-line,
embedded layer of “business consultants” whose
sole role is to provide advice and decision-making
support by working with the businesses.
Example 4 | Partnering in Action:
Understanding product profitability
Philip Peck, vice president of finance
transformation at Peloton, recently worked
with a life sciences company that, over
time, had grown from one commercialized
product into a large portfolio of
commercialized products along with
an expansive pipeline of prescription drugs
in various stages of development. According
to Peck, a key challenge was understanding
product profitability in the context of the
product’s lifespan.
The question was: How should sales,
marketing, and advertising funds be
distributed across the product line given
their profitability and time in the
market? Is the commercial sales organization
optimally aligned to the highest potential
products? “They also needed to understand
performance through the lens of the entire
enterprise [prescription] drug portfolio,”
said Peck.
In this case, FP&A spearheaded
development of robust profitability models
that required close collaboration with
various R&D, commercial, and corporate
functions. “These models were used to
optimize spending across products,
improve product margins and financial
performance, and provide a complete
portfolio view of the business,” said Peck.

Not everyone has an ideal organizational struc-
ture, and a lot depends on whether a company has
the right economies of scale. But as the Oracle and
Maersk Line case studies demonstrate, creating a
group of dedicated business partners can be an
effective way to focus FP&A attention on this
important role.
At ING, there’s a central FP&A function sup-
ported by decentral business partnering. In Pluijmers’
view, this structure is ideal, “as FP&A needs a solid
and easy process in place and strong (functional)
maintenance of tooling and procedures.” This hybrid
approach is efficient and helped ING attract the right
people for the job, e.g., candidates with strong num-
ber and excellent modelling and analytical skills.
At the same time, to develop the right business
acumen, FP&A needs to have a decentralized model
as well. “In order to understand the business, you
should be close to where it is happening,”
said Pluijmers.
Currently at Parexel, corporate-level FP&A reports
to management and handles investor relations. In
addition, each member of the team is also responsible
for one of the business units. However, Parexel is
moving to the next phase.
To enhance its business partnering capability,
Parexel is developing a CoE that will pull together
all of the reporting activities and free up its FP&A
professionals to focus on business collaboration and
analytics. “This way, we can create a pointed hiring
profile of critical skill sets for reporting and for busi-
ness partnering. Effective business partnering requires
soft skills, influencing and analytics capabilities,”
explained St. Francis.
Not only will it liberate the central FP&A team to
focus on business partnership, “but it would reinforce
our strategy of 24/5: We can follow the sun. These
days, nobody wants to wait for an answer,” he said.
The next two case studies illustrate best practice in
aligning the organizational structure of FP&A to support
its mission as a business partner. At Oracle and Maersk,
senior management is fully committed to ensuring
finance and business work together as a team.
Six Steps for Developing the
New FP&A Model
FP&A is evolving its structure to align itself with
this new, partnering role. According to The Hackett
Group’s Elliott, organizations are often not properly
set up to be effective business partners, and many
legacy FP&A organizations need to evolve to be able
to provide these types of higher-level business sup-
port services. To shift from legacy to future state, he
recommends companies follow these steps:
1. Step 1: Define the process taxonomy. FP&A
needs to determine what the services and
activities are that it currently offers, and which
it should offer going forward.
2. Step 2: Determine where the work should be
performed. Next, figure out where the work
should be conducted, e.g., at the local level,
centralized at HQ, or perhaps consolidated at
the CoE, where it can benefit from standard-
ization and economies of scale.
3. Step 3: Define the interaction model. FP&A
needs to define the communication protocol
for interaction with its various components.
Business partners may have to go to the CoE
for reporting and to the business partner for
decision support.
4. Step 4: Define roles and responsibilities. Over
time, the FP&A organization often picks up
responsibilities that should be handled by others
in finance, while business functions create shad-
ow FP&A functions. Choose to re-home these
activities when the function is restructured.
5. Step 5: Define skills and talent. As the organi-
zation shifts into a business partnering role, it
picks up new responsibilities. Finance will need
to outline career pathing to ensure junior staff
develops the skills necessary to become effec-
tive business partners.
6. Step 6: Develop FP&A sizing and validate
against best practices. Here, companies face
the question of affordability, i.e., understand-
ing how efficiencies gained in setting up a CoE
can fund enhanced business partnering. That
means easing up on the amount of time spent
on grunt work by eliminating or automating
low-value and repetitive tasks and repurposing
people’s time to focus on higher-value work.

Case Study 2: Oracle
A three-tier organization deploys an elite
team of FP&A consultants to work hand-in-
hand with the operations, while investing
heavily in developing finance talent.
“At Oracle, the finance organization is very
critical; we’re independent but embedded into
the business,” said Ivgen Guner, senior vice
president for Global Business Finance. Finance
is viewed as a business partner and, at the
same time, it has a direct reporting line into the
business finance organization, so it remains a
truly independent party.
To make it possible for finance to focus on
its partnership role, Oracle has done a lot of
heavy lifting over the past five years in terms
of automation and standardization, includ-
ing setting up an SSC and data center for
finance. Guner then completely reorganized
and relabeled the FP&A function into the
Global Business Finance function and set up
three distinct sub-organizations.
1. A center of excellence (CoE) that houses
the automation of all report generation.
2. A business partner support/FP&A func-
tion that houses all the analytics and does
the heavy lifting as far as providing the
layer above it with the support to deliver
value to the business.
3. A business partnership function that
includes true business advisors who work
hand in hand with operations to solve
problems, identify opportunities and get
deep into the business strategy.
The testimony for the approach’s success,
according to Guner, is that that business leaders
and the C-suite consistently seek out her team’s
advice when they want someone to provide an
independent opinion about business strategy
questions, such as scenario analysis and long-
term projections in a new market segment. At
the top level, the business partnership role is
held by the crème de la crème of finance talent
who help drive top-line growth and make a real
difference in the business.
Oracle forecasts weekly or even daily in a very
complex environment. “They’re very savvy in un-
derstanding each business line,” Guner said. “They
need to understand not just how the numbers
come together, but the dynamics of each deal,
each project, how the business goes to market, and
its implications to the top line as well as to the mar-
gin. Because they’re an independent function, they
can ask the hard questions in a timely manner as
they quickly grasp the accuracy of the information.”
Meanwhile, the business-partner-support
group performs the forecast analysis; prepares
the predictive KPIs, pipeline close trends and
cloud KPIs; and provides the analytical insight
to their business partner counterparts and to
the business. “That’s where the analytical heavy-
lifting takes place,” Guner explained. That group
can also see the common analyses business
partners require and standardize them across
the organization.
In turn, these two groups work very closely
with the CoE that streamlines the process, en-
hances strong data governance, automates the
reports and creates dashboards. Thus, business
and finance can have a real conversation without
having to spend time discussing whose data is
right. It also means management doesn’t need to
wait five days for those critical reports. “They’re
available within the system to me every day
when walk into the office,” said Guner.
An emphasis on talent development
“Certainly, it was initially hard to split the
full role into three, and tell somebody they’re
now responsible for a few, not a wide scope of
things,” she acknowledged. But Oracle sees the
three finance organizations as stepping stones; it
gradually promotes staff from the CoE level into
the business support role and, after learning the
various businesses, the staff can build the skills
they need to graduate into business partners.
To this end, Oracle has also established an
in-house training program called the Oracle
Finance Academy. “I wanted to have a fresh-

man, sophomore, and so forth training levels so
by the time staff graduates, they are ready to
become business partners,” Guner said.
The company’s post-graduate program helps
managers learn how to present to the C-suite.
They start with basic financial analysis and go
up from there. “We use a combination of infor-
mal rotation and internal training to develop our
people,” Guner said. The courses are designed
to strengthen both the analytical and soft skills
required for business partnering and all have
practical applications in the workplace. They
range from pure finance, such as “Financial Data
Analysis and Decision Making” to “Present-
ing Your Ideas at the Executive Level,” and the
curriculum changes as the company’s business
needs evolve. All courses are delivered virtually
through the cloud, are modular, and taught by
experts and university professors.
In addition, a sophisticated talent review
process ensures that the right people are in the
right roles and have the right opportunities to
grow. An executive committee meets every six
months to review talent and push people out of
their comfort zone if need be through a job-
rotation program that gives people a breadth of
experience in different geographies and lines of
business. Oracle also hires externally.
What it takes to be a business partner
To work effectively with the business, finance
needs to gain their trust. That hinges on the
development of soft skills, which are the hard-
est to train. “You either have them or you don’t,”
Guner said. These interpersonal and behavioral
skills include the ability to influence and ask good
questions, the tenacity to drive for excellence, and
the ability to change and show leadership. “You
need to know that there are times you should and
shouldn’t speak up and what’s the right way to do
it; that’s a communication skill,” she said. Broadly
speaking, it requires the following three major skill
sets, according to Guner.
• Technical expertise. “Obviously you need a
rock-solid foundation in finance and eco-
nomics, but what I really look for are people
with a highly strategic side, people with a
focus on looking at future needs rather than
looking at historical trends.”
• Business acumen. “It is critical that business
partners understand the strategy of the
business. What elements of the matrix are
most important? How do you advise based
on this knowledge? Our business leaders
are looking to finance to tell them the two
or three most important things to focus on
in a sea of data and numbers, and we need
to be able to provide that business insight
to them.”
• Interpersonal and behavioral skills. “These
are the hardest to find in candidates, and
also the hardest to develop once they’re
hired. An effective business partner is one
who can communicate clearly, builds strong
partnerships, influences and advocates,
and provides change leadership. A lot of
their success depends on those interper-
sonal skills. It is a much harder task if you
have not already gained the trust of the
C-level. The team you select to pursue any
new project has to possess that executive
presence and effective direct and precise
communication skills. They need to be
able to persuade and anticipate issues and
questions. Tenacity, drive for excellence, and
creativity with the right soft skills are the
real factors for success.”
In an effort to help hone these requisite soft
skills, she and Donald Anderson, Oracle’s direc-
tor of organization and talent development, have
been traveling the world to meet with the busi-
ness finance organization’s top talent. They meet
regularly with top talent in each region and have
them present on something that’s meaningful to
the business. Anderson works with the partners
to develop their presentation for a couple of
months before they visit. “It’s a lot of coaching
and it all goes a long way,” said Anderson.
Guner concluded: “You must make the time to
invest in the people.”

Case Study 3: Maersk Line
Anders Liu-Lindberg, a finance transformation ex-
pert at Maersk Line, has had a lot of experience in
business partnering. At Maersk Line, finance has
already transferred all of the traditional trans-
actional and analytics work into a global shared
service center (SSC). The goal was to free up the
finance team’s time to focus exclusively on part-
nering with the business. “We call it Finance Busi-
ness Partnering 2.0. We wanted to put finance in
play in a different way and place it in a position to
help the business add value,” Liu-Lindberg said.
Some years back, Maersk Line had already
introduced finance business partners into the
organization, but this new approach led to a
change of approximately 50 percent of the exist-
ing finance business partners as it required a new
skill set.
Ad-hoc analysis is still happening at the busi-
ness unit level. Finance business partners in the
front line work with the business to highlight
areas where performance may be lagging and
to figure out what actions should be taken to
improve performance. “They work with the SSC
and then bring the analytics to the front line,” he
said. “In addition, the finance business partners
work with the SSC to define what sort of stan-
dardized analysis it should produce on a weekly
or monthly basis to answer key business leaders’
questions and bring insight to the table.”
The new role requires new skills. More tradi-
tional controllers and financial analysis skills are
required to perform the transactional and basic
activities, according to Liu-Lindberg, whereas
for business partners, the company defined nine
required core competencies and rated whether
they were easy or hard to replace. The nine core
competencies chosen are: technical learning,
planning and drive for results, all easy to replace;
problem solving, presentation skills and peer
relationships, all moderately difficult to replace;
and interpersonal savvy, creativity and compo-
sure, all difficult to replace.
One of the key reasons Maersk Line believes
that its organizational structure works is that it’s
very hard to find one person who has the full
skill set, i.e., the classic financial skills as well as
the broader, business collaboration competen-
cies. By separating the two, it’s easier to find
the right talent, according to Liu-Lindberg. Most
companies still bundle the two skill sets within
FP&A, business controlling or business partner-
ing. “We don’t need to find that superhero,” he
said. “It’s not a combination of skills you can
develop from one day to the next. It takes time
and there are no shortcuts.”
The role of business partner is becoming even
more important because the business is asking
for the insight to be able to make data-driven
decisions. The onus is on finance to bring that
data to help the business make better decisions,
according to Liu-Lindberg. “If you’re in FP&A
or business controlling and the business is not
yet asking for this insight, it’s up to finance to
provide the business with the analysis,” he said.
“Once they get a taste of how finance can help
them do their jobs better, you’ll have to keep
delivering it.”
To be a successful partner, finance doesn’t
need to provide the answer to every question.
It needs to facilitate the conversation. Liu-
Lindberg recalls a specific instance when he
was working with Maersk Line’s drilling opera-
tion in Texas. The business was asked to reduce
costs by 10%. During a regular meeting, one of
the business leaders suggested setting up a
workshop to talk about how to cut cost from
the budget. Finance set up the meeting and its
agenda, and then ran the meeting. Liu-Lindberg
and his second in command each led a sub-
team charged with coming up with cost-savings
ideas, after which finance would run the num-
bers to help build the business case. Between
the two sub-teams, they managed to come up
with ideas that saved $4 million. “Finance does
not have to come up with all the ideas, but it
needs to deliver the process and develop the
business case,” he said. “You need to draw the
line at execution.”

Conclusion: Key Takeaways
The key to understanding finance’s collaboration
mission lies in the acknowledgement that the role of
the CFO is changing — and by extension, so is the
role that his or her team plays in supporting the organi-
zation, according to Max Thomiak, managing director
of CFO and Enterprise Value at Accenture Strategy.
As the markets break down barriers among products
and services, companies need to break down similar
barriers internally. And so does the finance organiza-
tion. “In response, finance is integrating so it can look
across many functions and more than just financial
information, and merge marketing controllers and
IT controllers into business controllers,” Thomiak
explained. “What we’re seeing is transformation in how
companies organize themselves and, consequently, their
finance organizations — enabled through
digital capabilities.”
Here are the five key takeaways from this guide:
1. Define the role. The first thing CFOs and their
teams should do is define the role of business
partners. While a lot of companies say finance is a
business partner, very few actually sit down with
the business to figure out what it really means, ac-
cording to Thomiak. “You also have to decide how
that role might differ by level of the organization,
e.g., what business partner skills are needed at the
corporate center, division and local operations.”
2. Develop a trusted bond. Next, FP&A needs to
develop a collaborative relationship with busi-
ness leaders by proving that it can add value and
enhance business performance. It can do so by pro-
viding information that’s relevant and practical and
showing that it understands the business model
and the challenges managers face.
3. Build a supportive technology. To ensure FP&A
can execute on its mandate to collaborate with
operations, it needs two types of technologies.
First, it needs to streamline low-value activities to
free up professionals’ time to focus on higher-value
tasks. Second it needs to integrate its planning
process through new solutions that democratize
the analytics process and show the financial impact
of operational decisions
4. Strive toward creating business advisory teams.
While this may not work for everyone, ideally
FP&A should have talent dedicated to the role of
business partnership, or in the least assigned to
specific businesses so they can develop a strong
relationship with their colleagues and learn about
the businesses they’re supporting.
5. Be customer focused. The only way to find out
whether the business partnership is working is to
ask the business partners. Figure out what they
need. “When I do a finance transformation proj-
ect, first I ask finance where they spend their time
now and where they want to spend it in the future.
Then I ask the business and often I get very differ-
ent feedback,” said Thomiak.
The point is that finance professionals may want to
be playing the role of a business partner but to a large
degree they don’t, “unless they first sit down with the
business and define what it means,” said Thomiak.
“You have to provide the business with what they need
to run their operations better.”
The critical part is having the time to work
with the business, and Liu-Lindberg is concerned
that while many companies see this as an impor-
tant mandate for FP&A and business controlling,
they don’t give their finance teams enough time to
spend on it.
His other cautionary remark: The behavior
has to be modeled at the top. “If the CFO is not
comfortable acting as a business partner, then
it is unlikely that the rest of the function will,”
he said. “To be effective, it needs to be both an
organizational and a mindset change.”

About the Author
Nilly Essaides is Director and Practice Lead of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)
at the Association for Financial Professionals. Nilly has over 25 years of experience in
research,writing and meeting facilitation in the global finance arena. She is a thought
leader and frequent speaker at industry events, the author of multiple in-depth AFP
Guides on FP&A topics as well as monthly articles and numerous blogs. Nilly was
managing director at the NeuGroup and co-led the company’s successful peer group
business. Nilly also co-authored a book about knowledge management and how to
transfer best practices with the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC).
About the Association for Financial Professionals
Headquartered outside Washington, D.C., the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP)
is the professional society that represents finance executives globally. AFP established and
administers the Certified Treasury ProfessionalTM
and Certified Corporate FP&A ProfessionalTM
credentials, which set standards of excellence in finance. The quarterly AFP Corporate Cash
Indicators®
serve as a bellwether of economic growth. The AFP Annual Conference is the
largest networking event for corporate finance professionals in the world.
AFP, Association for Financial Professionals, Certified Treasury Professional, and Certified
Corporate Financial Planning & Analysis Professional are registered trademarks of the
Association for Financial Professionals.©
2016 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
General Inquiries AFP@AFPonline.org
Web Site www.AFPonline.org
Phone 301.907.2862

Be a better
business partner.
Visit workiva.com/afp to see how.
You provide the insight, and Workiva
will back you up with the technology.
Wdesk is our cloud-based software that manages data,
communication, and productivity in a single environment,
freeing up more time for strategic analysis.

How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner

Similar to How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

How FP&A Can Become a Better Business Partner