CFO Magazine: Preparing for an Uncertain Future Requires Agility

There are several roadblocks to a full-fledged commitment to finance digital transformation. Some of those include:

• Legacy platforms make significant cross-functional changes difficult to execute
• Little or no resources committed to reskilling
• Inadequate change management processes
• Difficult to perform cost-benefit analysis because there aren’t always hard-dollar benefits

Read more at CFO Magazine >

McKinsey: Overcoming the Core-Technology Transformation Stalemate

“Which approach describes your digital transformation? “Repaint” by making the minimum investment required to maintain existing operations and digital channels; “renovate” through gradual but persistent upgrades of the core and more substantial improvements when necessary; and “rebuild and replace,” by building or buying a completely new IT stack (or large portions of it) and migrating the existing business to it. As companies progress on their transformation journey, they may switch from one archetype to another.”

Read more at McKinsey >

From Uncertainty to Agility

“The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the need for sophisticated, institutionalized risk management, including real-time scenario planning, business continuity planning and “sense and respond” capabilities. In the aftermath, we will likely see greater flexibility in network capacity, more local and multi-sourced supply, and multi-skilling of employees.”

Read more at SCM World >

How Agile Technology Drives Supply Chain Innovation

Change and uncertainty are inevitable in manufacturing. While effective production planning can support manufacturing processes, there will always be uncontrollable factors that are difficult to manage. Manufacturers are dealing with an increased pressure to meet customer demands quicker and more cost-effectively. Visibility of where manufacturers are within the production process is a key driver and control for an organization. Companies that have a detailed overview of every step of the production process are enabling machine integration with business applications. Without this integration, there is potential for reduced machine utilization, less effective enterprise resource planning, reduced consistency in product quality, and failures in many business performance fundamentals. The right technology enables agile and responsive supply chain management.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

A Systems Approach to Navigating Process Complexity

A system, at its most basic, is the interaction of various discrete components or parts. It’s easy enough to visualize and consider each of these parts in isolation; however, business leaders almost always underestimate the difficulty in predicting the outcomes and behavior of the system during the design stage. While the engineering and business fields have developed several methods (including root-cause analysis, scenario planning, etc.) to try to understand and address these issues, they still rely heavily on teams calculating or forecasting outcomes of systems. However, even systems with few elements create outcomes that cannot be calculated or predicted. Modern finance teams have found that leveraging existing technology solutions can increase process visibility and reduce risk. When considering how to approach different problems, key systems-thinking concepts need to be applied – considering that the impact of internal and external factors and changes can help address a challenge more comprehensively and in a timely manner. This approach also allows businesses to become increasingly agile in meting ever-changing customer demand.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

How Much is Your Business Complexity Costing You?

Without the right tools in place, business complexity is not only costly, it’s also a major hindrance to developing functional agility. The ability to respond quickly to changing market and internal conditions is critical for success in today’s ever-changing business climate. Recent research from The Hackett Group reported that organizational and process complexity are the second and third biggest inhibitors of becoming an agile finance function. Complexity is combination of different factors, all of them related and often specific to an industry or company. However, finance in any industry can reap substantial benefits from reducing the complexity of its operating environment.

Read More at The Hackett Group >

Boost Finance Agility with Modern Technology

“The relentless introduction of new technologies and innovative business models has accelerated the velocity of change in the business environment. To survive and thrive, companies must be attuned to shifts in market conditions and ready to make decisions fast – and implement them quickly – to alleviate their impact.”

According to The Hackett Group, there is a strong positive correlation between greater organizational agility and financial out-performance. While there is not a single way for executives to make decisions faster and expedite their execution, they can leverage a dynamic, integrated modern technology platform that enables agility across the organization.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Agile Project Management: Flexibility and Adaptability Win the Race

Traditional project management methods have been completely transformed by new tools and technologies that enable flexibility and adaptability across the business. Traditional methods are vulnerable to delays, miscalculations or unforeseen costs that can cause budget overruns, or overall failures to deliver on stated goals. Contrarily, agile project management is an iterative, adaptive approach that helps ensure the project delivers what the customer truly needs. The agile methodology adapts to business needs since it doesn’t have a set-in-stone scope. The scope may change, while resources and time are fixed. It allows businesses to quickly amend plans or shift directions and focus on a different solution if the business need changes mid-project.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >

Achieving an Agile Business in Two Steps

Finance leaders strive to simplify their business planning and amplify the transfer of knowledge across the organization. The business market rewards agility, while it punishes companies that are too slow and myopic to see what’s coming and to act before they suffer serious consequences. In an era where tomorrow may not look anything like today, agility may well be the defining characteristic of success. It’s not just about responding. It’s about responding in a way that produces the outcome your board, shareholders, employees, and customers will see as successful. What can a business do to attain agility? The answer is two-fold.

Read More at CFO Magazine >