We’re ready for the predictive planning challenge at ICV 2022!
On May 9th?and 10th?we will be attending and participating in the 46th?Congress of Controllers?(ICV) happening in Germany.??We’re really excited to have a chance to engage with the financial control industry once again – and we’re looking forward to seeing all those friendly faces that we’ve only seen via Zoom in recent times.
We wrote a post about the conference?here, but there was one piece that we didn’t touch on because it deserved its own space – so here we are!??As part of the congress proceedings, we are going to be participating in the BARC Predictive Planning Challenge – to test our mettle against some of our peers and contemporaries.
What is the BARC Predictive Planning Challenge?
As part of the ICV Congress of Controllers, there are a range of practical workshops and challenges that accompany the main keynote speeches.??This particular challenge is one of those and it fits squarely into what we do here at Apliqo.
The main objectives of the challenge are as follows:
This will be accomplished through a live challenge in the planning tools themselves, with no slides or company presentations.??Every team will receive the same data on a fictitious German beverage producer and will be required to plan the current and following year of sales based on all the information provided.??As participants, we’ll assume the position of financial controller in the company and will work to explore the expected sales volumes and accompanying context for all segments, product groups, and timelines within our data.
After which, we’ll need to present our findings in an interactive dashboard for the judges.??We’ll have a limited time to complete this and as mentioned above, everything must be done live.??The goal is to see what we can achieve by leveraging our software, knowledge, and expertise in a short period of time.??We can’t wait to get our hands dirty.
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What is going to be our approach?
Here at Apliqo, we’ve helped hundreds of clients work through challenges just like this and in every case our approach is customized for the specific context that we are faced with.??Our TM1 implementations are always done in a bespoke way and that’s exactly what we’ll do in this challenge.??By taking some time upfront to consider all the information we have access to, we can then plot the most efficient and effective way to translate that into an accurate plan.
From there, we’ll seek to identify and extract the key drivers that affect sales volumes as these will form the core mechanisms behind our forecasts.??TM1 is perfectly built for these and can ingest disparate data with ease – allowing us to plug in various assumptions in real-time – and get immediate results.
However, it’s not just the technology that plays a role here.??It’s also the domain expertise and experience that we have that will come into the equation.??Having seen so many of these projects in real life, we’re confident that the combined experience of our team will help us to arrive at a solution that is robust, contextual, and highly predictive.??And we’re sure that we’ll have lots of fun along the way.
What does the challenge mean to us?
This challenge is a great chance for us to go back to first principles and to tackle something that is directly tied to what we help our clients do.??By participating in the challenge and seeing how our peers tackle the same one – we are hoping to learn from all the best ideas that come out of the session.??We are always looking to level up our thinking when it comes to financial planning and this is a great way to do this – surrounded by others who might have different perspectives.
We’re looking forward to immersing ourselves and seeing what the group can come up with – so that we can bring these learnings back into our day-to-day operations.
Watch this space and we’ll have lots to share during and after the event!