For those of you unfortunate enough to have been within earshot when I have started to talk enthusiastically about my spreadsheet work (we’re a rare breed I know…), you may be familiar with the phrase “FAST modelling”, “FAST standard”, or something similar.
Today, many organizations – both private and public alike – are under pressure from owners, executive management, and activist investors to improve financial/operational performance necessary to either maintain their competitive leadership or to address financial challenges posed by today’s economy. When any of the following occur, the organization can benefit from a prescriptive review of their operations:
To those of you who know Andrew Codd this will not come as a surprise. He is inspiring.
I caught up with Andrew recently. A bulb lit during our conversation. As we described what we were up to, he helped me create an image of CFO.University that I had not pictured before.
Now that states and stores are reopening, we’re noticing in our conversations with retailers that measurement is a favorite topic. And understandably – retailers want agile control coming out of lockdown. As Peter Drucker the father of modern management said, “What gets Measured gets Managed”. With doubts that old metrics and ways of monitoring are adequate, there are three main questions that are being asked: With the requirements within a store changing fast, what metrics should we be measuring stores on in the “new normal”? As the main ways of assessing performance, versus Last Year and Budget, are out the window, what is the best way to measure and target performance improvement? How should performance be incentivized and rewarded to ensure the right behaviors? These are all areas we are exploring with multi-site retailers, as well as Quick Serve Restaurants. Here are our early thoughts.
Marketing is doing what finance should have done a long time ago – it’s using digital assets and data to take action.
The marketing function is using platforms that record data in one place, allowing people to analyze that information and use it to make better decisions.
Those intelligent actions then feed more data into the system, which allows much more rapid development and iteration around what works, what doesn’t.
