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"It is really helpful to have a guide like this to challenge some of your assumptions and to spur you to test the boundaries"
Graham Yerbury,
Management Information Systems, fc&a - E & P Segment, BP

Re-engineering the budget: pay-off and returns

Armed with this report, you can be prepared for the journey ahead: discover how others have solved the problems of moving from the old to the new order. Business Intelligence’s research distils the experience of leading companies to provide you with the benefit of the insights they have gained. In addition, there’s advice from experts who have helped organisations to implement these new ways of working.

How the innovators tackled their projects, the lessons they learnt and the new processes and practices they adopted are all mapped out in detail here to provide you with a comprehensive guide to transforming planning and budgeting.  The report gives you the inside stories of companies that have transformed planning and budgeting. Case studies illustrate the benefits to be gained:

• Boston Scientific saw a dramatic 62 per cent rise in global sales with greater predictability in performance after the introduction of a 12-month rolling plan updated quarterly.
• Herman Miller attributes its compound growth rate of 14.6 per cent since 1996 largely to its focus on Economic Value Added, EVA, which also involved a wholesale change to the role of the budget.
• Henkel successfully cut its planning costs from €4.75 million to €2.9 million in 2005, and reduced its FTE requirement from 89 to 55 after re-engineering its processes.
• UBS’s search for a superior way of implementing strategy led to the abandonment of its budget and the introduction of quarterly re-forecasting. Improved resource allocation, sharper decision making and reduced waste are three of the benefits the bank has chalked up.

These - and other companies covered in detail in this Report - have benefited from achieving a tighter grip on their businesses and better allocation of scarce resources. All claim bonuses from freeing up management time to concentrate on the business issues that really matter.

The dominant motivation for companies in changing their processes has been inspired by the ambition of raising their performance. It is not so much the desire to eradicate the inefficiencies of traditional budgeting that has driven them to change but the conviction that there are real opportunities to become more responsive and adaptive through innovative approaches to planning and budgeting.