Alight to Introduce Forecasting for Black Swans at FP&A 2010

Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that Rand Heer, Alight CEO and architect of the original Pillar software, will present a workshop titled: Forecasting for Black Swans: FP&As Role in Preparing for High Impact Improbable Events at the Financial Intelligence Forum for FP&A 2010. Heer’s presentation will be at 11:00 am Tuesday August 17th at The Westin Market Street in San Francisco, CA. Alight is the lead sponsor for the Financial Intelligence Forum FP&A 2010 event.

“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.”

Workshop 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 best practice workshops are consistently well received. We’ll continue to provide thought leadership and share practices in the planning space based on our extensive experience implementing budgeting and forecasting systems and the real world feedback we get from FP&A professionals who deal with current economy issues at the business unit level.” Lamorte will also chair panels at the conference reflecting on lessons learned and implications for FP&A attendees.

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 San Francisco FP&A 2010 Conference, visit www.gmi-solutions.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 175 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.