CFO Awards: Only 48% of Businesses Are Operating with an Agile Planning Process

Report provides actionable insights

and strategies to help businesses

plan for today and tomorrow

Vena Solutions, a platform that connects people, process and technology to power integrated finance-led business planning, today announced the release of the inaugural Vena Industry Benchmark Report. The report surveyed 350 business leaders and finance and operations professionals on how their organizations are facing the challenge of today’s unprecedented change, focusing on organizational culture, agile finance-led business planning processes, technology and data. 

The report reveals that many businesses are not well-positioned to pivot in the face of sudden changes and are not operating with agility as a core focus. 

“It was great to find that almost half of respondents are implementing more agile planning processes, but that leaves more than half who are not, which is a powerful insight but a little unsettling to learn,” said Hunter Madely, Chief Executive Officer at Vena Solutions. “Our passion is in providing our customers and community of business leaders and finance and operations professionals with best practices they can use to plan confidently with agility. With this report, we aim to add context to their decision making and provide a view to where they stand compared to others working through similar challenges and opportunities.”

In this report, Vena uncovered several other key findings, including:

• Only 44% of respondents have an early warning system in place to provide weekly and monthly operational and financial reviews 

• 40% of respondents aren’t utilizing scenario modeling, despite the current unpredictability in the market 

• Disparate and disconnected data sources remain a pivotal problem, with 57% still seeing this as a key organizational challenge

• The biggest challenge when it comes to effective planning is…everything. When asked to identify the greatest challenge to their current integrated planning  process—people and culture, process or technology—a large number of recipients couldn’t make a choice, with 49% saying “all of the above”

In today’s environment, finance and operations teams are at the forefront of change and must re-evaluate and recognize their ability to adapt to quickly changing conditions. Businesses need to have the right plan—but more than that, they need the right agile planning solutions, tools and processes in place to know when to act so teams can work together to ensure the health of the business today and tomorrow. With that in mind, the report also offers four recommendations for agile planning.

To view the full report, visit venasolutions.com/benchmark-report. To learn more about Vena, visit venasolutions.com.