Planning, budgeting and forecasting maturity assessment

How effective and efficient are your organisation’s planning, budgeting and forecasting (PBF) processes?

Understanding the maturity of your PBF capability is essential in determining where best to focus improvement efforts, as well as how far and fast these efforts should be pushed.

Using our experience and expertise of clients’ needs, we have designed a four-level maturity assessment, which helps organisations evaluate their PBF processes. It provides a structured approach to measuring competency and driving maturity.

Your organisation can fall into one of the four categories: Chicken, Goose, Sparrow or Falcon.

A description of which one corresponds to you and recommended actions will be given once you have answered all eleven questions below.

1. My organisation’s targets are based on: 2. Are the plans and forecasts in place driver-based, with what-if scenario capability? 3. Are the forecasts rolling? 4. How are plans and forecasts created currently? 5. Are there regular performance meetings in place currently? 6. The outputs of functional plans are: 7. Finance’s role in the planning, budgeting and forecasting process is to: 8. What technology is primarily used to drive planning, budgeting and forecasting? 9. Is there a global process owner for business planning and forecasting? 10. Consistency and standardisation of the PBF process is: 11. The governance of the process involves:

Please make sure that you answer all the questions above. Any that don’t have an answer are marked in red.

Your score suggests you fall into the organisation category of a Chicken

Chicken

Common traits of Chicken organisations include:

Planning, budgeting and forecasting is limited to static financial figures;
Functional plans are created in isolation;
Budgeting and forecasting are seen as a finance administrative process;
Planning is mainly done via spreadsheets, existing technology is not well-utilised;
Processes are inconsistent across business units, underpinned by different assumptions and guidelines;
Forecasts tend to be less than 75% accurate.

Your score suggests you fall into the organisation category of a Falcon

Falcon

Common traits of Falcon organisations include:

Targets based on benchmark, peer and long-term performance;
“One plan / forecast” – a single, integrated plan created by a cross-functional team;
One global process and cross-functional governance that is fully integrated across the business to continuously ensure one set of numbers;
An iterative and agile approach to improving planning capability. Use of data driven machine learning and AI;
Forecasts are more than 95% accurate.

Your score suggests you fall into the organisation category of a Goose

Goose

Common traits of Goose organisations include:

High level strategic plans used to create targets with incentives based on mix of financial and non-financial indicators;
Regular cross-functional business performance meetings to review progress, risks and opportunities;
Processes are largely standard, with consistent assumptions and guidelines;
Technology used for analysis and reporting, however planning input is still done via spreadsheets;
Forecasts accuracy is between 75% and 85%.

Your score suggests you fall into the organisation category of a Sparrow

Sparrow

Common traits of Sparrow organisations include:

Significant consideration of peer performance in developing targets;
Functional plans regularly aligned to produce financial plans and forecasts;
Technology is used to drive more efficient processes. Analytical tools improve forecasting accuracy, which tends to be between 85% and 95%;
Rolling, driver-based forecasts include external information;
One global process with clear operational dependencies and inputs.

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Svilena Tzekova

Partner, Corporates

KPMG in the UK

+44(0)7714 844 254

Email svilena.tzekova@kpmg.co.uk