Conference opening

Why do we create bad charts and ineffective visuals? Why do we tell exciting stories to our friends but give a boring set of numbers at work presentations? If you have ever created a chart in Microsoft Excel, then you should attend. If you have created a chart in any other tool, then you should definitely attend. This is not an Excel manual; this presentation is about applying principles of storytelling to your business data visualizations, regardless of the tool. During this short presentation, you will learn what makes a good chart and I will l give you a step-by-step recipe for creating a good chart. You will make a shift from just showing the data to actual visual storytelling!

Forecasts are supposed to provide an organization with the best estimate of future performance. They are essential for steering businesses in dynamic environments and managing relations with external stakeholders. However, they are often compromised by a lack of judgement and expertise as well as an individual's motivation and cognitive biases. Despite mechanisms to improve the forecasting process, such as accuracy incentives or the use of management accountants, forecasts have often been considered as biased and the forecasting process with all its checks and balances as cumbersome and inefficient. Algorithm-based calculations such as predictive analytics have been proposed as a promising alternative to forecasts that rely on human intelligence. However, these forecasts are not perfect either. They tend to be perceived as black boxes that do not provide enough information about what is driving the forecast, which reduces their acceptance and actionability. Furthermore, algorithms rely on historic data and might not incorporate recent or highly tacit — or implied — information. In a context of structural changes and extraordinary events, human judgement might be better suited to produce a fairly accurate forecast.

The story of how Group reporting was developed at Orbico. We began by standardizing master data, mapping data, and adding group dimensions. Our goal was to obtain a uniform overview of all the companies in the group. We faced a lot of obstacles, such as different systems, applications, data structures and data mess. This is still an ongoing issue. After consolidating a large amount of data, we began creating standard reports and working on automatization and, whenever possible, adding more data. With enough data in place, we were able to compare and analyse it. New issues arose, such as data complexity and too much disconnected data coming from different sources. Data challenges are always present and resolving them is an ongoing process. If you want to have a flexible organization, you need to adjust to new circumstances all the time. The role of controlling is to give data meaning and establish constant communication with business. The aim is to meet business needs under rapidly changing circumstances, and to do this with the help of data.

Luiza and Jörn will present Liquidity Model created by them during their ICV international working group project carried our last year 2020. They used the power of Monte Carlo Simulation that is not a new tool but they found it still modern and very rarely used on a daily basis in companies.

10 minutes for exercise with Olympian

Lunch Break

• Who is the right customer • How to create a customer financial profit • How to manage a win-win relationship with your customers in pandemic situation

Try and fail and learn and try and learn and deploy and learn and...it is not the “3rd rock from the sun”. Hospital managers do not have an easy task. They increasingly have to address the issue of reductions in patient hospital stays and the transfer of inpatient care to the outpatient setting. This should prevent inadequate expenditure and avoidable expenses, but also bring benefits for patients (reduction in infection rates and psychological stress caused by hospitalization, more rapid return to their home environment). After creating SWOT and stakeholder analyses, the next goal is to create a classification model to help identify emergency department patients who will return. This allows staff to better allocate their resources and the ambulance transport to better plan their service. Finally, a demonstration of how project management is designed for this purpose will be given. A mixture of agile and classic approaches is best suited for this - a predefined plan that may be adapted and rewritten. 1. What did you fail at? 2. What lessons did you learn from the experience?

How can controllers help their organizations be more sustainable? Data analytics-based tools can help people make better decisions and most importantly, make decisions easier rather than harder. Our presentation focuses on a people-centered approach to analytics and an analytics-based approach to sustainability. This powerful combination can help controllers create and support change in this area of critical business and social importance. We identify several analytics-based approaches to improve transparency and enhance results across all three components of the triple-bottom line approach. Additionally, we introduce a set of accessible tools that controllers can use to integrate sustainability and analytics into their work, concluding with some concrete action items that will hopefully be useful to conference participants.

End of day 01