Read this blog to learn why and how Predictive intelligence is important for today's office of finance
Introduction
With the rapid rate of change in today’s markets, CFOs must be able to keep up with evolving market dynamics. To do this, they will need a deep understanding and insight into all aspects of finance processes like predictive budgeting, forecasting and planning to lead the Office of Finance and help drive the sustained success of the business down the line—regardless of market disruptions. Predictive intelligence, also referred to as predictive analytics is a powerful tool that can help CFOs enhance decision making in times of constant change and uncertainty by allowing them to fully exploit the large data sets at their disposal and generate timely actionable insights.
What is Predictive Intelligence?
Predictive intelligence is a new machine learning-empowered solution that interconnects all the data and not only predicts outcomes but also highlights all the key variables impacting your performance.
It works by pulling in real-time data from various sources across the organization and analyzing this against historical data and seasonal insights. It helps anticipates market changes, missed assumptions or future outcomes that are critical to making robust, business-wide decisions.
Predictive Intelligence is rapidly gaining momentum in many industries. Grandview research estimates that the global market for the technology is growing at a CAGR of 23.2% and is projected to grow to $23.9 Billion by 2025.
How can predictive intelligence benefit today’s planners?
Predictive Intelligence uses Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and advanced data analytics methods, making it an agile, comprehensive, and data-driven approach to overall business planning and executive decision making.
This allows finance teams can do away from time-consuming data collection and instead focus on analyzing mission-critical projections such as sales trends, consumer behavior, supply and demand etc. that can impact the business in the future.
As a result, enterprises can gain more agility, greater accuracy and trusted plans to boost their financial performances by providing explainable predictions and faster actionable insights. In a nutshell, predictive intelligence can:
- Reduce planning cycle times
- Increase accuracy, quality & transparency of data
- Generate better decisions faster from comprehensive, connected performance insights
- Align finance & operations
- Optimize resources
- Empower business planners
What to look for in a predictive intelligence software?
Predictive Intelligence technologies are becoming more commonplace in the market. But not all are the same. If you’re on the lookout to invest in the technology, consider the following must-haves during your selection process:
- It provides instant accurate plans
The ideal Predictive Intelligence solution should be able to quickly generate forecasts. To do that, the solution must be able to leverage machine learning to intelligently—and almost instantly— create predictive forecasting models from your historical data that will boost budgeting, planning and forecasting.
- It identifies underlying business drivers
Machine learning is highly efficient in making correlations from historical, operational, financial and external data. It uncovers the why behind predictions. The solution should demonstrate this ability as it will produce explainable predictions that unlock performance drivers of predicted outcomes.
- It utilizes machine learning for simulation and historial data mapping
Simulations allow a glimpse into the potential impact of certain changes. A good Predictive Intelligence solution has ML-powered simulation tools and historical data mapping capabilities that train on your data to understand your patterns and map out the path to new goals.
- It empowers planners even without a data science background
Go for a solution that is easily implemented by financial planners and should be ready-made to support users intuitively regardless of data science experience with little to no risk of human error or bias.
- It aligns finance and operations
Rapidly changing business conditions are challenging organizations to stay on track of their short and long-term goals. Oftentimes, finance and operations struggle to produce recommendations fast enough, pivot plans with enough agility, all while maintaining accuracy in their forecasts. Aligning goals and data sets become even harder as a result.
Choose a solution that marries operational data with financial data so you can save more time and effort from reconciling predictions with much greater accuracy and speed.
Conclusion
There’s no silver bullet for business disruption. But fortunately, there are new technologies like CCH Tagetik Predictive Intelligence can that supplement human judgment, empowering Finance leaders to predict and mitigate the impact of uncertainties, as well as spot and leverage opportunities.
If you want to have a deeper understanding of the role of Predictive Intelligence in today’s business landscape, download our whitepaper “Make a comeback: How can CFOs emerge stronger in 2022 with Predictive Intelligence?” outlines expert insights drawn from the experiences of Finance leaders in their respective organizations.
To know more about CCH Tagetik Predictive Intelligence, visit here.
