The Ledger
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Tag Archives: CFO
The Digital Finance Advantage
The Hackett Group’s 2019 Key Issues Study revealed that cost reduction was finance’s top improvement priority for this year. The study found that finance leaders expect digital transformation will have a dramatic impact on their performance, their operating models, and their skills and role definitions in the next two to three years. Cost optimization is a huge driver of finance shifting to digital. Digitalization can have a major effect on finance organizations by significantly reducing costs and increasing efficiency. By taking advantage of digital tools, finance leaders can match the efficiency levels of today’s world-class finance functions.
Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >
Effective Cost Transformation Requires Buy-In From the C-Suite
Cost management is no longer simply a way for companies to improve margins and save money. Finance leaders are now using cost reduction as a powerful lever for digital transformation and to gain better insight into their business. Often times, CEOs delegate responsibility for cost reduction efforts to other leaders within the business. This hands-off approach could be costing their company a lot more money and strategic opportunities than they realize because CEOs have the clout and broad organizational reach to break down a lot of barriers that often hinder successful cost reduction efforts. By bringing a more strategic perspective to cost management, and directly encouraging teams to think bigger, CEOs can enable breakthroughs that are more impactful, such as re-configuring the business or changing the operating model. These strategic cost management approaches offer potential savings that are much larger − and much more sustainable.
Read More at Chief Executive >
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.
Cost Management is Evolving With the Help of New Technologies
“Making effective cost management decisions—those that drive strategic value beyond just producing short-term savings—requires understanding how cost decisions flow through to the top and bottom lines.”
CFOs depend on insights from their analytics for important business decisions, but when faced with the rapidly changing business environments, they must change their approach to cost management. By implementing the right tools and technologies, businesses will better understand their value levers and fundamentally change their company’s cost structs, seize opportunities, and grow profitability. However, technology alone is not enough to accomplish this. Effective digital cost management also requires a far more innovative and strategic approach than traditional approaches to cost management.
Read More at The Wall Street Journal >
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 >
Technology is Igniting Change Across Businesses Everywhere
In today’s business climate, technology has become a vital element—from the use of a logo maker to design a business logo, to building a website and promoting your products and services through social media. Now, technology is also bringing CFOs and CIOs together for better decision making because the roles are often linked when it comes to strategy.
A good effective website helps build a strong online presence and helps communicate quality information to your consumers. Today not having a website may raise a question of its legitimacy. In recent years, cheap reseller hosting has become an increasingly popular option for small and medium-sized businesses. Customers expect legitimate, trustworthy businesses to have a website and social media accounts. When considering a new website for your business, read this post about the best to make speedy WordPress site. You can also consult experts like Web Design Cardiff.
Over the last several years, advanced analytics have steadily disrupted business models, markets and IT operations. Analytics engines, algorithms, Unlimited Graphic Design Services and supporting infrastructure have become more powerful, and the data available for analysis has grown exponentially. Companies may use a custom architectural signage to make their space more inviting and exciting.
For many companies, remaining competitive can depend on their ability to harness analytics. A well-crafted marketing plan like these marketing plan for architects is essential in this landscape, as it enables firms to align their strategies with data-driven insights. As a result, businesses are adjusting their foundational forces that affect the quality of their analytics, such as modernizing legacy core systems, integrating existing technologies, and adopting dynamic technologies that can handle analytics and planning processes in a single environment. Businesses are also hiring managed IT services in Charlotte NC to help streamline things and improve efficiency within their organization.
Upgrading business technology, along with following the procurement tips that can be found at https://www.tradebeyond.com/articles/procurement-tips-and-tricks may help retailers and suppliers to manage their operations more efficiently. These can also help grow their business by building or entering a wider network of entrepreneurs.
How Federal CFOs Can Drive Cost Transparency
CFO’s across government agencies are encountering challenges when establishing effective cost management and accounting practices because of complex issues rooted in data, systems, processes, and/or organizational structure. The need for more cost transparency stem from an increasing need to link strategic objectives to the budget, cost of programs and services, and performance measures. CFOs looking to implement cost transparency initiatives can leverage a tool that deploys a managed services model to efficiently achieve cost management, accounting and performance objectives.
Read More at The Wallstreet Journal >
Growing Confidence in Decision Making With a Single Source of the Truth
By leveraging advanced analytics from next-generation technologies, executives no longer have to wonder if they data they are using to make vital business decisions is accurate. For CFOs and financial teams, then, advocating for their business’s transformation into an intelligent enterprise should be a top priority. Advanced technologies use sophisticated mathematical algorithms and high-speed computing power to generate patterns about this data that are dependable and accurate. That data can then be used by the technology itself, or a living person, to make a decision that the business expects will provide the best possible outcome.
Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >
Intelligent Automation in the C-Suite
“Intelligent automation boosts both day-to-day finance functions and the quality of finance’s strategic insight.”
Digital Transformation is in everyday tasks and gives insight into how AI impacts the average finance member up to the CFO. The greatest benefits of automated processes come from the finance function’s improved ability to be proactive and creative in providing the company with insights on trends driving the business. The heightened ability to use data to create better-informed narratives based on the fluctuation analysis provided by AI has enabled businesses to reach a higher level of sophistication in every finance team’s work.