Program

In today’s competitive business landscape, getting value from each dollar of expense is critical to finding investment dollars, running lean, and meeting targets. Cost optimization is a critical way to look at processes and infrastructure, but it is confused and sometimes tarnished by its proximity to cost savings. This session explores the differences and provide examples of how Verizon, one of the largest and most complex companies, is delving into innovative strategies and best practices for reducing expenses while maintaining or improving quality and efficiency.

What if you could adopt the proven leadership strategies used by Marine Corps Officers who inspire their teams in the most demanding combat environments to keep your team motivated? While finance leaders are not on the battlefield, they can still leverage these military principles to drive their teams to success. Discover how to: become the people leader your team wants to follow; lead with agility and a bias for action; and maintain a balanced perspective within your team. By the end of this session, you will be equipped with actionable tools to motivate your team to ‘run towards the fire’—empowering them to confront and conquer the toughest business challenges of tomorrow.

As FP&A professionals advance from individual contributor roles to leadership positions, they must shift their focus from purely compliance-driven tasks to actively influencing strategic business decisions. The ability to translate complex financial data into compelling narratives becomes essential, the skill to balance detail-oriented analysis with a vision for the bigger picture—while making informed decisions amid uncertainty.  This session addresses these critical challenges, offering practical insights and actionable strategies for successfully stepping into finance leadership roles. Participants gain a deeper understanding of how to guide not only their own transition but also to mentor and support others navigating a similar journey.

For FP&A to achieve maximum value, it needs to deliver finance and business acumen to its partners across the business and engaged vendors. This type of interaction goes beyond just having a cup of coffee with your partners; it is based on best practices for breaking down complex finance functions, distributing tasks, and ensuring seamless integration of results. This session provides insights into the key areas essential for impactful collaboration: communication, project management, service level agreements, technology, and collaboration with partners. These essential components prepare finance teams to scale their impact and stay current with upgraded capabilities.

Power BI empowers finance professionals to enhance reporting, analysis, and decision-making with advanced data visualization and integration. This session covers key strategies for implementation, best practices for smooth transitions, and customization techniques tailored to your team. Explore data integration methods, real-world case studies, and change management for fostering a data-driven culture. Whether you're new to Power BI or refining your setup, you'll gain the tools to drive financial excellence and strategic decision-making.

Finance departments often have a complex relationship with reporting automation. While there's general agreement on the benefits of eliminating manual tasks, many remain doubtful, believing that “it would never work here.” This session looks at common sources of resistance to reporting automation and walks through a real-world case study of the implementation of automated reporting with a major healthcare distributor. Most importantly, leveraging our structured framework for setting up these projects, each participant builds a custom plan for leaning into a reporting automation opportunity in their own workplaces.

Integrated financial planning is one of the most important capabilities within FP&A and accurate sales forecasts are essential to comprehensive financial planning. In this session, an FP&A practitioner and Microsoft MVP explore the art and science of revenue forecasting using Excel. Designed for finance professionals looking to enhance their integrated modeling expertise, this session provides practical techniques and insights for building robust, flexible, and scalable revenue models. You'll gain a fuller understanding of key operating assumptions and scenario-building principles enabling your long-term planning models to evolve seamlessly without adding unnecessary complexity.

FP&A transformation projects are critical for driving informed decision-making and strategic planning within organizations; however, many projects fail to meet their goals. This panel discussion brings together accomplished company project leaders and seasoned consultants to provide a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to deliver successful projects and create sustained value within organizations by examining areas things to know before starting, what to do better next time, the actions that ensured project success, and how to ensure long-term impact. By focusing on real-world experiences and practical advice, this discussion gives attendees the tools and knowledge needed to enhance their project success and contribute to their organization's long-term goals.

Portillo’s, a fast-casual restaurant chain, saw rapid growth leading to its IPO in 2021. Despite this success, the company’s legacy FP&A systems, which were heavily dependent on outdated Excel-based EPM solutions, faced significant challenges-manual processes, limited functionality, and an inability to adapt to evolving business needs were key issues. To address these challenges, Portillo’s embarked on a comprehensive finance transformation by implementing a purpose-built EPM cloud solution specifically designed for retail best practices. Join this session to hear how this fiancé transformation enhanced Portillo’s financial management capabilities enabling advanced weekly driver-based sales planning and reporting. Discover how these improvements can be applied across various industries and organizations.

AI is already helping FP&A leaders revolutionize financial operations and company performance. Join four leading FP&A practitioners as they detail the transformative effects AI has had on their workflows. This session showcases how AI has driven improvements in forecasting accuracy—both top-line and bottom-line—reduced manual data manipulation and transformation, and automated reporting across business units. Gain insights into the actionable strategies these leaders employed to integrate AI into their processes and the impacts they’ve seen on their teams and organizations.