Rising tariffs, shifting policy, and market instability have pushed scenario planning from best practice to strategic necessity. CFOs who embed agile forecasting, cross-functional input, and data-driven modeling into their planning cycles can lead with clarity, despite volatility.
Here’s how to turn scenario planning into a strategic advantage instead of a contingency tool.
Shift From Static to Dynamic Budgeting and Forecasting
Traditional annual budgets and forecasts become outdated almost immediately. To stay responsive to shifting market conditions, proactive CFOs are adopting agile planning cycles, anchored by rolling forecasts updated monthly or quarterly. As such, dynamic budgeting and forecasting must become a core finance capability. The most effective models integrate top-down strategic targets with detailed bottom-up input from departments, ensuring alignment with enterprise goals while grounding plans in operational realities.
This hybrid approach enables more realistic, flexible resource allocation and accelerates decision-making. It also creates a foundation for cost optimization strategies like zero-based transformation, helping finance leaders unlock savings without sacrificing agility.
Leverage Real-Time Data Analytics and AI
Employing advanced data analytics tools, including predictive analytics and machine learning (ML), enables CFOs to identify financial trends, improve forecasting accuracy, and make more informed and timely decisions. These tools can help quickly analyze the impact of tariffs or market fluctuations on KPIs. Today’s leading organizations are finding particular success with OneStream.
OneStream’s Sensible AI is a suite of purpose-built AI solutions that accurately derive scenarios in real time, enhancing strategic decision-making. The Sensible AI portfolio includes ML and AI models built directly on top of OneStream’s unified data model and proprietary financial intelligence. This allows finance teams to identify trends, analyze business drivers, and create forecasts from trusted enterprise data with unparalleled accuracy and speed.
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Simplify and transform corporate performance management processes like financial consolidation, reporting, planning, and analytics across the portfolio.
Data Infrastructure as a Strategic Asset
The impact of any scenario model is only as strong as the data behind it. That means integrating finance platforms with operational and commercial systems, unifying definitions (e.g., customer, cost center), and enforcing governance protocols to ensure clean, trusted data feeds into forecasts.
But better forecasting also requires stronger infrastructure. CFOs should use this opportunity to assess IT spend, which often reveals redundant systems, underutilized licenses, and shadow tools that drive up cost and complexity. Rationalizing overlapping platforms across finance, procurement, and analytics reduces spend, streamlines data architecture, and accelerates access to actionable insight.
Contingency Planning and Reforecasting
Tariffs and economic uncertainties demand a thorough reassessment of forecasts and budgets. Account for various scenarios, such as changing FX rates, declining customer demand, and elongated procurement lead times as part of standard operating procedure moving forward. By leveraging cross-functional input from procurement, sales, operations, and FP&A, CFOs can mitigate risks and rapidly spin up new enterprise plans. CrossCountry Consulting’s proprietary reporting and analytics framework integrates cross-functional data from across the organization to surface new insights, harness the power of hidden data, and accelerate speed-to-decision in today’s environment.
Liquidity Monitoring and Forecasting
Accurate cash flow and liquidity forecasting enable CFOs to understand and respond to increased cost structures and shifting customer demand. The keys are near-real-time monitoring of working capital balances, late-paying customers, slow-moving inventory, material purchase orders, and sales pipeline tracking. With greater visibility into the company’s liquidity position, CFOs can balance strategic risk-taking with risk management. Plus, with direct connections between source systems, CFOs can stay on top of capital deployment in real time through reporting and forecasting engines.
Want in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations? Explore the full CFO report here.
Evaluation of Pricing Strategies
Developing a pricing strategy that balances absorbing tariff costs with ensuring profitability is essential. OneStream Sensible AI assists entities in assessing their ability to increase pricing, considering factors such as product impact, customer arrangements, consumer demand elasticity, and market share. This strategic evaluation allows CFOs to make recommendations on how to take the portfolio to market while preserving margins.
Proactive Reporting and Dashboarding
To track economic volatility effectively, FP&A teams must develop and monitor KPIs such as tariff-adjusted COGS, pricing impacts, incremental compliance costs, and margin trends. Compiling this information into executive-friendly dashboards enables CFOs to bridge variances against budget and confidently plan for future scenarios. A comprehensive data strategy ensures these KPIs paint the right picture and enable CFOs to see around corners. Data strategy is also the cornerstone of AI enablement.
The Rewired Finance Operating Model
Scenario planning isn’t just for the finance function – it’s a cross-enterprise capability. To embed agility at scale, CFOs must lead the redesign of the finance operating model itself by:
- Aligning FP&A, procurement, and business unit planning cycles.
- Defining clear ownership for inputs, models, and decision triggers.
- Establishing a finance center of excellence (CoE) to maintain tools, data, and best practices.
- Training business partners to engage with rolling forecasts and scenario outputs.
- Streamlining governance so decisions can match the pace of change.
When these pieces are aligned, scenario planning becomes more than a response mechanism – it becomes the engine of strategic finance.
Ready to rewire for agility? Contact CrossCountry Consulting to explore how scenario planning, data infrastructure, and operating model transformation can unlock smarter, faster decisions.