Life Hacks For the “Next-Gen” CFO

To be a real strategic partner to the business, modern CFOs must embrace new technologies and tools available to them that can give them a major analytical boost. Business intelligence has become a necessary tool that helps businesses organize, analyze, and contextualize the information they collect. BI takes financial and operational data to produce integrated dashboards, key performance indicators and, most critically, business insights. As such, it has become today’s CFOs key asset, enabling the finance function to provide the business with automated data analytics for historical, current, and predictive views of operations.

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How Successful Growing Businesses Are Making Profitable Decisions

“The core of every growing business is an ability to adapt to a world of new opportunities and disruptive risks. Every shift – from detecting the need for change to determining the best move forward – should be informed by data from both inside and outside the organization.”

As midsize companies continue to adapt and grow in an ever-changing marketplace, they must find new and more efficient ways to drive revenue and respond to their customer’s needs. High performing growing businesses are the ones who are adopting technologies that provide advanced predictive analytics and important financial insights. By integrating data analytics and automation capabilities across the enterprise enables these businesses to create a more innovative and profitable decision-making process.

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IT and Finance Collaboration is the Key to Unlocking Powerful Business Analytics

Business leaders aim to make decisions faster and more accurately through automation and predictive modeling. Tools, technological innovation, and increasingly powerful business insights are readily available everywhere. However, a business only gets out of their technologies what the tool is actually capable of giving them. Decision makers must choose a platform that best fits their business specifically, and often times it is not a “one-stop-shop” solution. Moreover, it takes collaboration between finance and IT because there is no substitute for finance’s knowledge and experience to ensure that an accounting system meets their organization’s needs. As financial eyes and ears of their business, finance professionals can provide critical insight into business processes and requirements that can help decision makers get a true picture of the organization

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Leveraging the Right Data Platform Can Make Any Midsize Business Unstoppable

Data is the one element of a business than can make or break it when it comes to profitability. Data is so vast and diverse these days, that a lack of integration between applications can weaken any competitive advantage. Without an integrated, corporate-wide strategy, growing companies may find it extremely challenging to aim in a single direction. Midsize businesses can especially benefit from cloud-based platforms that are resilient and provide a unified system that ensures all decision makers are working from one source of the truth. A disciplined approach and a tool that can convert data into actionable decisions can be so impactful that the largest competitors may find it hard to keep up.

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Data Mismanagement: How Good Data Can Lead to Bad Decisions

Master data is the foundation upon which businesses make important decisions. Since requirements for business data, reporting, and documentation have increased in the past few years, incorrectly recorded master data, lack of master data maintenance, and the storage of master data across too many systems create enormous challenges. In addition to this, more and more companies are beginning to use data analytics to process data better, real-time insights faster, and understand trends and future opportunities. If a large portion of the data is incorrect, data analytics are misleading, and people on the production floor and in the boardroom are working with the wrong numbers.

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New Costing Priorities Are Changing the Way We Do Business

In the wake of digital transformation becoming a standard business practice, it is no surprise that modern organizations are shifting their costing priorities from cost reduction to cost transformation. Companies that relied on more traditional cost management methods are now finding that dynamic technologies can open the door to a whole new level of savings. These additional cost savings allow businesses to compete more effectively in an increasingly digital environment. This change in business strategy drives finance leaders’ priorities to focus more on implementing the best technology for their business, and ultimately increase product profitability.  A best in class tool that caters to specific business needs enables organizations to achieve end-to-end visibility of their costs and use this information to better understand what is driving their profits.

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Agility and Integrated Analytics Are Essential to a Scalable Business

Businesses today that strive to get ahead of their competition need to have smarter, faster, collaborative and innovative systems that enable agility and advanced analytics. These organizations need a vision and strategy to define the future digital business state. It’s what aligns people in the organization on the priorities, capabilities, and collaboration required to successfully remove legacy business models and operations. For a business to successfully transform from today’s legacy products and business models to tomorrow’s scalable digital businesses, leaders need the ability to integrate external data sources. Adopting multi-disciplinary agile practices and making internal and external data available for decision making are two of the steps to driving digital core organizations. The most important step is changing the culture.

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New Research Proves Cost Management is Still a Global Imperative

In today’s increasingly digital world, businesses recognize the need to transform their operations and capabilities by adopting more integrated and dynamic technologies. Deloitte recently released their 2019 Global Cost Survey, and the findings show that cost reduction and cost management remains a top priority for businesses worldwide. “By harnessing the power of digital technology to streamline their cost structures and generate cost savings, companies can take full advantage of the latest digital innovations — becoming the disrupters, rather than the disrupted.” – Omar Aguilar, principal and global strategic cost transformation leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP. We all know there are only two ways to grow profits – generate more revenue or reduce costs. Investing in technology to drive down costs is important – but investing in technology to understand the true drivers of cost in your organization is equally important.

Read the full report at Deloitte >

Manufacturing Finance of the Future: The Digital CFO

 “The CFO function within manufacturing organizations needs to make significant changes to enable companies to meet the challenges of the shift to digital manufacturing, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, or any one of the other associated names.”

Efforts to adapt finance functions to digital manufacturing has become a priority for modern CFOs in the industry. Manufacturers of all sizes are connecting finance directly to digital manufacturing’s data-rich environment with cutting-edge data analytics, revising strategic plans and accounting practices to incorporate new approaches to the market, and building new partnerships and finance arrangements with technology and equipment suppliers. The key to accomplishing this is developing the data analytics and systems capability to achieve real-time managerial costing and other business analytics and finding the flexibility and means to adapt the manufacturing business model and management capability to a digital Industry 4.0 world.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >