Can you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these three questions?
- Do you have inaccurate forecasts?
- Is inaccurate data leading to expensive mistakes?
- Is inconsistent forecasting leading to missed opportunities?
If so, then process automation is your solution! Adopting automated techniques greatly enhances accuracy while simultaneously increasing team productivity and scalability. Reliable forecasts enable smarter decision making that propels your company’s expansion forward.
Manual Data Forecasting Can Present Challenges
Inaccurate data forecasting can have devastating repercussions for both your portfolio company and private equity firm. A new client of Cortado Group was experiencing this pain point before bringing our RevOps experts to the table. Our client felt they were losing credibility with their private equity firm leadership, preventing buy-in to much needed expansion. The root of their forecasting inaccuracy was compiling data from multiple sources. Pulling multi-source data together involves manually populating data. With this came many challenges. Employees owning company forecasting were spending hours, if not days, acquiring the data to report on. This led to incorrect and unreliable forecasting that resulted in lost credibility. Not to mention the time and effort wasted on highly intelligent team members who could have been impacting the company for more scalable growth.
Manual data forecasting in internal RevOps teams is a tedious and taxing endeavor. Your team must cope with infinite market trends, financial statements, company performance, etc. Deriving meaningful insights within reasonable time frames becomes increasingly challenging. Reliance on multiple data sources only compounds these difficulties. Private equity firms rely heavily on databases, market research, and internal records as data sources. Collecting, organizing and reconciling this data manually is the main culprit for inaccurate forecasts.
Private equity firms require timely and accurate forecasts in order to make informed investment decisions. Manual data forecasting often falls short in meeting this demand due to its time-consuming data gathering, analysis, and reporting processes. It’s not uncommon for employees to spend days pulling and acquiring data. There were times where delays lead to missed opportunities due to the time spent. In the case of our client example, the C-Suite Executive project sponsor was adamant about automating their reporting to reduce manual labor among her team. One comment captured during a conversation with them impacted how we developed our plan of attack:
Manual data forecasting also hinders innovation and competitiveness. To stay up-to-date in an environment of ever-evolving financial markets, companies must continuously adapt and update their forecasting models. When too much time is spent on manual processes, it leaves no room for exploring advanced techniques and analytic tools. This also weakens a company’s ability to scale and grow.
An effective solution to these challenges lies in adopting process automation. This involves treamlining data forecasting, increasing the accuracy of forecasts and enabling data-driven decisions. By leveraging automated systems, portfolio companies can overcome manual forecasting limitations. Automation helps to eliminate errors and provides better access and snackable views into data-driven insights for strategic advantages. This improved access to insights yields faster analysis to deliver more accurate findings and encourage innovation.
Benefits of Automated Data Forecasting Processes
One client in particular benefited from new process automation tools, saving significant time and resources spent on manual analysis. Best-in-class processes positively impacted this client with optimized reporting together with a streamlined and optimized customer relationship management (CRM) system. This overall effort gave this client the ability to accurately collect relevant data. No guesswork was involved. Process automation has enabled the creation of live, accurate forecasting data in their new dashboards and reports.
Private equity firms rely on qualitative models in order to predict future returns. Because there may be numerous parties involved in collecting this information, it’s imperative that it all gets collected, entered, and interpreted correctly. Process automation transforms data forecasting for portfolio companies. This delivers greater accuracy and positively affects those firms as a whole. Let’s examine four compelling ways process automation can facilitate this shift:
- Minimize Errors, Make Accurate Decisions: Automating data collection, integration, and validation minimizes errors, ensuring accurate investment decisions and valuations. Automation simplifies due diligence by automating data collection, standardizing analysis, and generating comprehensive reports, improving accuracy and efficiency.
- Faster, Frequent Forecasts: Process automation enables portfolio companies to conduct faster, more frequent data forecasting. Automation tools offer advanced modeling and analysis features, empowering firms to gain deeper insights and make data-driven investment decisions.
- Scalable Efficiency: Process automation efficiently manages large data volumes, allowing private equity firms to scale their forecasting capacities without compromising accuracy or efficiency.
- Real-time Portfolio Monitoring: Automation enables continuous monitoring of portfolio performance, tracking key indicators and facilitating proactive decision-making for optimized returns.
Companies leveraging process automation increase data accuracy. Private equity firms can rely on an immediate benefit in terms of improved investment decisions and portfolio performance improvement, leading to greater success for both firms and their portfolio companies.
Choosing the Right Process Automation Tool for Your Business’s Data Forecasting Needs
How can you select an ideal process automation tool for your business? Start by assessing your requirements. Take into account various aspects that support data forecasting requirements such as:
- Forecasting techniques and models that you require.
- Your company size and scale, in addition to how many employees will utilize process automation tools.
- Implementation costs as well as necessary technical expertise related to process automation tools.
Many CRMs have in-house automation tools. Salesforce’s native automation tool, “Flow”, is powerful and agile. Take our client, for example. Their Sales and Customer Success teams wanted to spend less manual time creating Renewal Opportunities once a new Opportunity had Close Won.
After gathering requirements, our RevOps team built a Flow to automate the creation of a Renewal Opportunity triggered by a Closed Won. Important information deemed necessary by these teams for the Renewal was auto-populated. This eliminated manual time spent and no imperative data was lost.
Although Salesforce and other CRM systems native automation tools are powerful, they have their limitations. When considering possible third party solutions, well-known process automation tools include Tray.io, Zapier, and Microsoft Power Automate. They each offer unique features and capabilities which could fit with your requirements.
How to Automate Data Forecasting Procedures
Implementing data forecasting process automation requires developing a detailed plan. This involves understanding all available sources and effectively incorporating them throughout the automation process. In tandem, understand any data quality issues or create governance policies to protect sensitive information.
Once process automation tools have been selected, they must be tailored specifically to the portfolio company’s needs. This involves setting up workflows, rules and triggers, as well as seamlessly integrating automation with existing systems and processes. Extensive testing to ensure accurate results and optimal performance is a must.
Implementing process automation may require substantial upfront investments of both time and resources, yet its rewards are considerable. Automation delivers improved accuracy, efficiency and productivity to drive better business decisions. This leads to revenue growth, business scalability enhancements and customer satisfaction enhancements.
Conclusion
Implementing process automation in your business will significantly increase data accuracy. This in turn has an immediate positive impact for the private equity firm that acquired your portfolio company. Automation eliminates human error that occurs during manual data processing, leading to improved accuracy overall.
Process automation improves efficiency, productivity and scalability, empowering your team to make better business decisions while reaching desired goals more quickly and accurately. In this process of automation, assessing data forecasting requirements is of utmost importance. Select tools tailored specifically to those requirements and create an actionable plan for integration and management for a successful implementation.
Adopting process automation and employing appropriate tools and strategies will enable you to increase your data forecasting abilities. Automation’s increased accuracy and productivity won’t just benefit your company. Its lasting effects will have an influence on both the private equity firm that acquired you as well as overall performance outcomes for both parties involved.
Don’t Settle for Guesswork: Upgrade Your Data Forecasting with Process Automation!
