Streamline your sales procedures in operational plan for Financial Services

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when i came to watlow i was one of the instigators of the sofp process and i had a lot of passion around this topic because i had been a part of organizations that did annual budgets and for anybody who's worked on annual budgets you'll know you'll understand that they take two to three months to complete and then about one month after they're completed they're already irrelevant so my career i've been thinking about okay that we spent all of this time for something that has really no value so when i came to watlo as the controller i looked at this as my opportunity to make a change in how we did our forecasting so we completely did away with annual budgets we now run an 18-month sofp process and and the concept is you forecast for 18 months you add a new month each month but you're just making tweaks or you're making large adjustments for large things that you know about so let's say you got um a big customer win that you didn't know about the previous month well now you would add that in it works pretty well for our business because we have a lot of projects that may span the development of those may span 18 to 24 months we may not get revenue for quite a long time so we're aware of those projects today i'm aware of projects today that will be revenue in 18 months so we put those in once we put those in we now have visibility the capacity that we're going to need so that will it also helps us to plan out our capacity whether it be capital or people much farther in advance couple of other things i've heard people say as well when you're forecasting out that far there's really not much effort put into the later months and certainly there's much more rigor in the beginning part of the process but um what the types of things that you're looking for in those later months are as i just mentioned those development projects which are further out we use a lot of other economic indicators that help us think about trends in the business where the business is going so it's it's really been a good tool for us to help us proactively plan and i would also say if i took the amount of time we spent each month on sofp and i compared it to what we used to spend on an annual budget process i am certain it's much less time and the quality is probably much it definitely is much better because it's the data is much more relevant so we're we are now able to much better predict uh what's going to happen in our business than we were in the past you