CFO Strategic Empowerment Series 3

Transcription

1 White Paper CFO Strategic Empowerment Series 3 How CFOs Can Achieve Efficient Process Execution and Continue Their Journey to Become Truly Strategic In business for people.

2 CFO Strategic Empowerment Series 3 How CFOs Can Achieve Efficient Process Execution and Continue Their Journey to Become Truly Strategic As companies navigate the changing balance of the global business environment, the role of the Chief Financial Officer is in flux. When planning to meet these challenges, you ll find that a new suite of technology solutions is available to facilitate your efforts, but effectively leveraging those capabilities requires sound strategy and a clear road map for moving your organization forward. Expanding Roles for the Office of Finance A recurring theme for CFOs is the need for the Office of Finance to take a driving role in the strategic goals of the organization. But consulting firm Protiviti s 2015 Priority Index reveals a year-over-year increase in the need to improve on process execution across the board, marking a clear hindrance for strategic planning. Such a comprehensive set of obstacles would have been overwhelming even a few years ago, but an intelligent rollout of next-generation tools can now help you adopt a strategic approach that addresses your process priorities from both a top-down and bottom-up vector. Navigating the Business Empowerment Maturity Model Achieving truly strategic capabilities is a journey, so it s important to recognize where you are on that path, and understand how efficient process execution will fuel the engine that drives you to its end. You can use the CFO Business Empowerment Maturity Model as a road map for this journey, broken down into four key milestones: Standardize: You ll implement a standard structure for your finance procedures to minimize redundancies while maximizing ownership and transparency. Optimize: You ll boost process execution efficiency to reduce costs and allow your people to work within a holistic framework of unified shared services. Predict: Your new efficiency will provide powerful analytics capabilities, allowing you to leverage your own data to lay the foundation for strategic planning. Drive: You ll achieve true strategic capability and begin using your data to spot new opportunities for profit growth. Once you ve standardized your procedures and reached the first milestone, it s time to learn how you can use efficient process execution to continue moving up the maturity model. 2 The Unit4 People Platform

3 Aligning Process Execution With CFO Goals to Reap Strategic Benefits To engage in a successful revamp of your process structures, you ll need to be supported by applications empowering every department to contribute to your strategic goals. A best-fit software solution should: Provide an adaptable, centralized framework for your data and departmental workflows. Serve as a holistic support platform for your structured finance procedures. Give you flexible reporting and analytics tools to help form the big picture for future strategic planning. Making your process execution more efficient gives your organization a strategic edge that will yield farreaching dividends. From a cost reduction angle, a unified framework for processes lets you finally find the single version of the truth that is often elusive in fragmented work environments where each department has its own procedures and systems. Additionally, the holistic perspective provided by shared services lets you maximize the impact of your strategic planning, ensuring that any given choice is built on the truest framework possible. From there, the costs of disruption avoidance and general finance operations will fall dramatically, and can be cut by as much as 55 percent, according to analyses from research firm International Data Corporation. given list is managed by a gatekeeper whose workflow habits are often so personalized that it s impossible for other staff to effectively access that data themselves. Such an environment is tailor-made to drive process execution efficiency into the ground, and requires a complete re-thinking of the entire framework in order to repair it. Expanding Business Capabilities with an Elastic Foundation To overcome efficiency obstacles, your personnel need to be able to work in a system that gives them easy access to the data they require, regardless of where it originated. Next-generation solutions address this need by providing a unified data architecture, with built-in interoperability that allows each department to contribute to the entire organization s operation. But truly efficient process execution is about more than the cost savings, and can serve as the backbone of a new system that s equipped to effectively handle every challenge you re likely to face, now and into the future. Overcoming Efficiency Obstacles Consider a typical finance environment, where data is stored in spreadsheet, lists and other static databases. Every time a new report is compiled, personnel need to wade through those lists to find the relevant data points. This leaves the door wide open for the introduction of errors, and can make it impossible to build a genuinely comprehensive dataset. It also inflates staffing costs far beyond the actual value being provided to the organization. Worst of all, it provides no room for flexibility or cooperation, as any

4 Instead of maintaining dozens of proprietary individual spreadsheets, your personnel can upload data to a centralized database whose datapoints can easily be found and compiled as necessary. Instead of spending an afternoon coordinating a datashare over or conference call, your people can immediately access the database and compile the report themselves. To maximize this efficiency, next-generation solutions like Unit4 s are driven by the concept of an Elastic Foundation. Instead of hard-coded modules and static interfaces, an Elastic Foundation enables flexible user interactions. This allows your personnel to transfer their personal habits and preferences to the unified architecture, so they can set up an interface that s intuitive for them, boosting their productivity while still maintaining the integrity of the data itself. Features like report templates and interface layouts can be shared, so if one person has found the best answer for a particular task, there s no need for others on the team to try and replicate it on their own device. All of this can be done quickly, intuitively and without a coder, eliminating the need for expensive IT support to manage basic software functionality. Using Efficient Process Execution to Empower the Office of Finance Ultimately, implementing efficient process execution is about making sure you re not so burdened by the mechanical details of finance that you struggle to keep an eye on the strategic meta-concerns that dominate the future. Providing your teams with a platform built on an Elastic Foundation with expanded business capabilities lets them maximize their added value, and provides you with the stable flexibility you ll need to continue your journey and become a truly strategic Chief Financial Officer. Sources 1. Ventana Research: The Office of Finance on the Brink of Change 2. ACCA: Finance Transformation Roles: Pathways to CFO 3. FERF/Protivi: 2015 Finance Priorities Survey 4. Gartner: People Platform to Take Key Role in Unit4 Rebranding Building a Foundation for the Future An Elastic Foundation also extends into future functionality. Features like the Extend and Relate capabilities in Unit4 s People Platform let your personnel make changes to a shared module that is automatically disseminated to all related areas of the application. This allows your team to create an evolving suite of customized software interactions to prepare for new projects, letting them focus on high-value activities instead of data wrangling and housekeeping. This enhanced functionality boosts performance from the bottom-up by giving your personnel the tools they need to be successful and stay flexible. The ability to tailor solutions to individual roles and tasks lets them adapt the software to their specific requirements, giving them easy access to relevant information. Because they re now operating in a unified software ecosystem, their ability to seamlessly collaborate is also enhanced. 4 The Unit4 People Platform

5 About Unit4 Unit4 is a leading provider of enterprise applications empowering people in service organizations. With annual revenue over US $550M (500M Euro) and more than 4,000 employees world-wide, Unit4 delivers ERP, industryfocused and best-in-class applications. Thousands of organizations from sectors including professional services, education, public sector, not-for-profit, real estate, wholesale, and financial services benefit from Unit4 solutions. Unit4 is in business for people. unit4.com/us Unit Chatterton Way, Victoria, BC V8X 5J2, Canada T E info@unit4software.com 1000 Elm Street Suite 801, Manchester, NH 03101, USA T E info@unit4software.com Copyright Unit4 All rights reserved. The information contained in this document is intended for general information only, as it is summary in nature and subject to change. Any third-party brand names and/or trademarks referenced are either registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. WP150226INT-5405 In business for people.