Business Intelligence & Analytics for Finance Professionals

Course Overview

Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology used to analyse and present data meaningfully. It helps organisations make better decisions by providing insights into their data. BI technology creates reports, dashboards, and visualisations that help organisations understand their data and make better decisions. Major vendors for BI technology include Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Tableau, etc. These vendors provide various products and services to help organisations get the most out of their data.

This Business Intelligence and Analytics for Finance Professionals training course will discuss the changing role of Finance organisations and the shift of the focus of Finance Practitioners in general and Financial Planners from that of traditional gatekeepers to that of key decision-makers charged with strategic performance optimisation. It highlights how, in a world where firms face intense competition for both customers and investors, the key challenge for today’s finance professional is to step up and support the value creation process by moving from a narrow reporting role to embrace and exploit the full opportunities provided by today’s Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) systems. It will focus on the tools and techniques used by world-class finance functions to provide critical business insights. C-Suite executives need effective data-driven decision management.

Course Objectives

This training course will explain and practically demonstrate how finance professionals can use Business Intelligence and Business Analytics techniques to optimise the information and insights presented to managers and senior executives in the context of data-driven decision management.

After the training course, the participants will learn to:

• Understand the frame of financial insights in the context of business process improvement
• Know how to exploit the tools of Business Intelligence and Analytics systems
• Develop financial and non-financial key performance measures
• Apply the tools and techniques of predictive analytics
• Design powerful graphics for data visualisation and infographics

Target Audience

This training course will significantly raise the skills and effectiveness of any finance professional engaged in financial planning, performance management reporting or decision-making support in any organisation using modern Enterprise Resource Planning systems supported by Business Intelligence and Business Analytics tools.

It is suitable for a wide range of working professionals, including (but not limited to) the following: 

• Finance Professionals across the organisation
• Head Office Planning Managers
• Budgeting and Forecasting Teams
• Commercial Managers
• Finance Strategic Business Partners

Training Methodology

This training course will be presented in a highly participative workshop format using activities, case studies and practical examples. Participants can develop practical skills for using predictive analytics to prepare business forecasts and Excel to design graphics for data visualisation and infographics presentations.