How to remove the risk from your planning and forecasting

To remove any business risk emerging from your planning and forecasting, you must first understand it. From how to identify that risk to managing, analysing and accurately judging it. With an array of risks, from competitors’ movements to cost volatility, removing risk seems almost impossible. Almost.

Identifying

Firstly, you must acknowledge that traditional budgets and forecasts can be limiting. They often revolve around single-point estimates and a broad-brush approach that does not reflect the real combination of key risks your company faces at any given moment. Changing your approach to risk-adjusted planning and forecasting allows you to generate a range of possible outcomes based on multiple risk assumptions. This can give you greater confidence in your numbers and manage your risks more effectively.

Managing

While the basic method of risk adjustment is available to any business, you need something more robust. Analysts, Boards and Investors are all demanding deeper insights into risk and performance. To deliver this, you need to integrate your risk management and strategic planning processes. Across many different spreadsheets, this is beyond difficult. Clear Plan provides a combined all-in-one planning and forecasting solution, which makes integrating processes and reporting easy.

Analysing

Of course, removing risk from your planning and forecasting allows you to focus on your business as a whole. But to get there, you must first drill down and focus on individual business units. Once this analysis has been built up through collaboration and review, you will easily be able to visualise the company’s key risks.

Improving

This system for identifying, managing and analysing risk is not just about planning and producing more reliable forecasts. It also gives you the ability to understand your company’s key risks and their impact, so you can boost your businesses performance in this area too.

Understand more about Adaptive Insights software and how it helps you remove risk from your planning and forecasting.