The journey to Strategy-Focused Planning begins with a cohesive strategic plan that translates high-level business strategy into a set of strategic themes, targets and initiatives.  Dr Robert Kaplan will describe how to create this strategic architecture, which provides the foundation for an integrated planning and budgeting process and enables a new category of expenditure we call “Stratex”.

Hear how American Express entered a new era of planning using a strong understanding of the business and its external market underscored with the use of competitive intelligence, investment optimisation, reengineering and dynamic targeting - to create informed forecasts and devise plans to achieve consistent performance and sustainable growth.

Most organisations continue to suffer breakdowns in their planning and budgeting processes, which inhibit an organisation from reaching its maximum financial performance.  If planning is to generate value, executives must commit to a comprehensive, integrated, planning process.  Explore a framework for optimising the planning and budgeting process, which includes a portfolio of tools and methods that help forge a link between strategy and operations, accelerate the decision-making cycle to allow investment choices to be made on a continual basis, and improve an organisation’s core capabilities critical to deliver business results.

Scottish Enterprise  - Scotland's main economic development agency - acts as a catalyst to help the people and businesses of Scotland succeed in building a world-class economy.  Traditionally public sector organisations have tried to implement strategy by the top down control of resources in the planning and budgeting function, and Scottish Enterprise was no different.  But, by adopting the Balanced Scorecard methodology, devolving decision making and changing behaviour within the organisation, Scottish Enterprise now focuses on achieving outcomes.  The “outcome” perspective has enabled the organisation to become more adaptive and has proven more effective in demonstrating added value to the Scottish economy.  Hear Ed Payne’s experience, in his role as Head of Corporate Planning - a role that has recently moved from the Strategy to the Finance function - a move that recognises and reinforces the need for dynamic planning, resourcing the organisation for the longer term outcomes. 

Understand how Time-Driven ABC can be integrated into the Balanced Scorecard to drive Corporate Performance Management. Professor Bruggeman will present how a distribution company used Time-Driven ABC to:

• Identify new strategic initiatiatives linked to the key objectives of their strategy map
• Plan and simulate the profitability impact of new strategic initiatives
• Estimate the profit potential of synergies
• Motivate operational employees and sales representatives to execute profit enhancing initiatives
• Evaluate the profitability of strategies
• Organise profit management as a continuous process
• Act as an engine of a Corporate Performance Management system

Fortis Insurance Group has in place a sophisticated management information and strategy execution system built around BSC methodology, that enables the entire organisation to “live the strategy”, in what is a complicated, high transaction, high labour environment.  In its continuous strive for performance improvement, Fortis decided to introduce Time-Driven ABC as a new, complementary element to its strategy management approach.  Time-Driven ABC has enabled a ‘time measure’ to be included in the analysis of all key business processes, enabling management to target specific activities and processes for performance improvement, for process innovation, or for cost savings. Hear how the project, still in its early stages, has identified specific performance improvement and cost saving areas and can be tied to tangible business results.

Competitive advantage is built upon an organisation’s ability to deliver products and services uniquely desired by customers. Analytics serve as a catalyst for driving performance by providing detailed information on customer satisfaction and loyalty. But analytics are also essential to ensure that loyal customers are profitable. Dr Kaplan will share a variety of case studies on how organisations migrate from simple customer analytics to complex profitability information that incorporate lifetime value and comprehensive customer relationships.

The insurance industry is a very complex and competitive business. Complexity makes it difficult to align strong execution and strategy throughout the whole business model, but often the secret to competitive advantage lies at many different points along the insurance value chain. Because of its intangible nature superior performance relies on multiple levers to be executed in the right way, alignment of people in the form of the right competencies with new processes and new technology is the key to sustainable advantage in this industry. Hear how Allianz, from the starting point of the Strategy Map, applies analytics to drill down to the most granular level of the organisation, providing insight into the processes underpinning the business ‘engine’.  Making the business visible in this way enables the strategy to be executed in a continuous loop of feedback and improvement.

While many CEOs have "Theory Y" visions of being strategy-focused, customer-oriented, lean, adaptive, empowered, learning organizations, they are still being managed through "Theory X" performance management systems with annual budgets, negotiated targets and top-down controls at their core. It is therefore not surprising that this "collision of cultures" causes most initiatives to fail. Unless the CFO is prepared to change these systems then the CEO's vision will remain a pipedream. But what should they do differently? Jeremy Hope will present a new vision for Finance that involves switching their resources from low-value to high-value work and adopting new control systems that support more self-regulation based around clearly thought-through strategies and processes.

The oil and gas company Statoil is Scandinavias largest company. An increasingly dynamic and unpredictable business environment triggered a fundamental rethinking around the real drivers of performance.  The company decided to abolish traditional budgeting in 2005. Budgets were seen as a time-wasting barrier to good performance, and have been replaced with a fundamentally different leadership approach and management process. The presentation will address the:

• Case for change- what's wrong with budgets?
• New leadership model - more than a change in  finance processes
• Implementation journey - getting approval and overcoming resistance
• Partnership with HR - essential for success