Alight CEO to Address Forecasting for Black Swans in Las Vegas

Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced Rand Heer, Alight CEO and founder and architect of the original Pillar software, and Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing & Sales will present a preconference workshop to address the challenges and application solutions for implementing rolling forecasts. In addition, Heer will lead a breakout session: Forecasting for Black Swans: FP&A's Role in Preparing for High-Impact, Improbable Events as part of The Performance Conference 2010 set for October 12-14 at Bally's Las Vegas.

“In his groundbreaking book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb describes the elements of Black Swans, those highly improbable events, such as the financial crisis of 2008, that cause massive negative and positive consequences,” said Heer. “In this workshop I’ll translate Taleb’s theories into best practices for how finance should think about and plan for Black Swans.”

Session topics will include:

• What are Black Swans? Definitions and examples from recent history.
• Understanding your domain: the risks and opportunities of “scale” in businesses.
• You can’t predict the future, but… strategies for preparing for high impact events.
• The Black Swan modeling checklist: specifics for getting a handle.
• The special role of scenario analysis for understanding exposures.

Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing & Sales at Alight, observes: “Alight’s pre-conference workshops and sessions are consistently well received and are of value to anyone looking to improve their forecasting processes. Attendees appreciate the presentations since our material is focused on better planning and is not a product demonstration. Building off a successful presentation in San Francisco, Alight will be making its first presentation of Forecasting for Black Swans at a major conference.”

For a live demo of Alight Enterprise 6, or for more information about Alight’s full-spectrum planning solutions, visit www.alightplanning.com.

For more information about The Performance Conference, visit www.theperformanceconference.com.

About Alight LLC
Alight LLC’s Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 200 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pittsburgh Mercy, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.