Is Now the Time for Driver Based Budgeting?

Although the publication of ‘Budgeting for the Agile Enterprise – a driver-based budgeting toolkit’ a couple for years ago was met with enthusiasm from the advocates of new ways of budgeting, it gently sank without trace. However the uncertainty of the last couple of years, during which many companies have been frustrated at their inability to re-forecast with the speed or frequency they would like, seems to have given new impetus to the search for a better way of budgeting.

So during this morning’s EPM breakfast meeting at SAP Sapphire here in Orlando, it was a plesaure delight to listen to Sandy Rogers, Director of Financial Systems at Qwest Communications talk on their adoption of driver-based planning and budgeting that consulting organization Column 5 Consulting helped them implement in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidations. Being a numbers business, telecoms is an ideal industry in which to implement a driver-based approach to planning and budgeting and Sandy shared some of the benefits of the approach as well of some of the change management issues in helping financial analysts and business folk move away from the ultimately false security that comes from a traditional approach to budgeting with its endless line item detail.

With Sandy and other like minded folk sharing their success, who knows, this common sense idea may finally gain the wider adoption it deserves.