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| 301 Peaks and Pitfalls of Planning: 20 Years in the Trenches |
Speaker:
Chris Caren, General Manager, Microsoft
Dan Bulos, President, Symmetry Corporation
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Focus:
Has your organization’s approach to creating budgets, plans, and forecasts kept pace with the latest approaches to performance management? The best planning infrastructures support the planning process by integrating a broader performance management function. Discover what works and what doesn’t work in a practical context. This session will cover:
• Creating an integrated planning environment to avoid planning silos;
• Adding value to the planning process by clearly defining the role of spreadsheets;
• Incorporating planning into a 360o Performance Management approach;
• Matching planning software to your critical needs.
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| 302 Trends in Health Care: How Consumerism Helps Engage Employees and Reduce Cost — Improving Employee Health and Lowering Costs |
Speaker:
John Young, VP, Consumerism, CIGNA HealthCare
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Focus:
In the past ten years, employer gross health care costs have increased almost 120 percent, making it one of the greatest cost pressures on company income statements. And since the U.S. spends significantly more on health care than other similar countries, the cost increases are impacting U.S. global competitiveness. The solution is not in cost-shifting through plan design. An effective health benefits strategy focuses on financial ownership and health advocacy to engage consumers. And this consumer-driven approach will remove costs from the health care system — rather than simply shift it — by engaging employees in their health and motivating them to become part of the solution. This session will show the value of well designed consumer-driven plans as well as the overall impact of a broader consumerism strategy to effectively help manage long-term costs. Employee health care costs are one of the greatest cost pressures on a company income statement. And the most effective way to positively impact those costs is through increased employee health awareness and improvement to drive long-term productivity improvement. This workshop will discuss how to get employees to treat their health care expenses differently and will review the importance of getting employees to take responsibility for their health to avoid unnecessary health care costs.
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| 303 Why Wall Street Cares About your Supply Chain |
Speaker:
Joe Hornberger, Director, Supply Chain Risk Group , Manhattan Associates
Chuck Poirier, Partner, Consulting Group, Computer Sciences Corporation
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Focus:
In this session, attendees will learn:
• An outline of supply chain best practices that have proven results from industry leaders;
• The potential financial impact to be achieved from adopting these practices — based on documented survey results;
• The role the financial officer can play in being more active in promoting and deploying supply chain improvement initiatives;
• How to mitigate risk in global supply chains and create more predictable earnings;
• How to please Wall Street with more predictable earnings.
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Take Away:
After attending this session, attendees can expect to have greater insight into how they can play a specific role in promoting and deploying techniques that will improve supply chain processing and bring new revenues as well as enhanced earnings to their firms. Attendees will also understand how too many firms overlook the higher values that can be gained through more active participation of senior managers in supply chain efforts across the full business enterprise.
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| 304 Budgeting Beyond Excel |
| F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, providing solutions that make all applications secure, fast, and available. As a growing organization, F5 found that using Excel for their budgeting process was becoming both cumbersome and time consuming. Due to the company’s global reach, F5’s budget tracking requirements became too great for Excel and did not provide sufficient access for International Controllers. Distributing budget information around the world became problematic, as Excel files alone did not deliver the flexibility and performance the company required, in part because individuals couldn’t access the same spreadsheet at the same time. Financial Analyst Robert Howe, F5 Networks, presents the overall methodology used in moving away from Excel-based budgeting to a web-based solution. F5 now relies on a software solution to quickly create and analyze budgets, making the process more efficient, timely and accurate. The time saved from having an automated process in place has allowed F5 to spend more time on analytics rather than manually processing results via Excel worksheets. |
Speaker:
Robert Howe, Financial Analyst, F5 Networks Inc.
Andrew Conde, Regional Account Manager, Clarity Systems
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Focus:
This session is for financial executives who want to harness the power of performance management technology. This workshop will provide valuable insight if you are looking to improve budgeting, HR planning practices and reporting. F5 will present the overall methodology used to make the transformation from a manual to an automated process as well as key lessons learned.
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Take Away:
Attendees will leave this session with insight into the challenges F5 faced with financial planning as a result of large international growth. Delegates will gain an understanding of how they successfully improved process efficiency, strategic decision making, and cross-organizational visibility by using a performance management solution.
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| 305 Extreme Revenue Recognition — Beyond the Spreadsheets: Revenue Management Best Practices |
Speaker:
Dan Darst, Engagement Director, Softrax Corporation
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Focus:
Today's CFO is faced with ever increasing pressures, especially in the back-office. Issues such as the use of spreadsheets and revenue recognition plague the finance department. And whether we’re talking about traditional business models, or emerging models such as SaaS, studies show that the vast majority of companies, both public and private, are relying on manual processes to perform key revenue recognition and reporting functionality. The presenter will discuss the challenges of managing complex revenue recognition processes and the impact various business models have on these processes. You'll hear about the uniqueness of the revenue process, why it is handled outside typical enterprise systems and why companies largely rely upon spreadsheets. In addition, the session will address how revenue KPIs (key performance indicators) can provide a different view into your business, as well as outline success strategies for various business models supporting the audit and financial controls through a streamlined, compliant revenue process.
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Take Away:
After attending this session, attendees will better understand how to apply business intelligence and revenue recognition to enhance strategic decisions; how to monitor your business to prevent badly timed and misstated revenue; and how to turn your revenue policy into an automated workflow driven, integrated solution.
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| 307 Managing for Value — Lessons Learned from Private Equity |
Speaker:
Juan Carlos Webster, Principal, Booz Allen Hamilton
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Focus:
It is a known fact that private equity firms generate superior returns for investors by buying and restructuring undervalued companies. In the past much of the value generation came from financial engineering while today, value is created largely through management-based improvements. This workshop will provide insights into the management approaches that corporate leaders can adopt if they want to increase shareholder value in a manner similar to that of private equity.
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Take Away:
Through a combination of examples, case studies and best practices, you will be provided with the tools to generate excellent shareholder value and address the big questions facing management today — e.g., What components of my portfolio should we grow, fix or sell? Why manage for long-term value? Is capital structure important? Should a company increase its dividend payout? Should companies be more conservative when assessing an acquisition target?
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