How Insights Drive Data-Driven Accounting

Businesses use data to understand how the business is performing, to manage operations, and to make key business decisions. With the accelerating pace of business today, accurate, up-to-date data is more essential than ever. Finance leaders need operational and performance data to know how their department is performing, to efficiently manage their operations, and to enable data-driven decision-making. It is imperative for companies to start modernizing their accounting functions in order to remain competitive. This starts by eliminated manual processes and digitizing operations. Once this is done, accounting and finance executives need access to performance data to improve their processes.

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Connecting the Dots Between Manufacturing Data and Insight

Today’s manufacturers have more quality data at their fingertips than ever before. Companies are now leveraging tools to collect extensive amounts of data about their production processes—across multiple lines and sites, around the clock. Real-time data quality is key to plant-floor operators because it enables them to spot manufacturing issues and inconsistencies before they magnify, make timely corrections, and determine where to focus process improvement efforts at the plant and enterprise levels. To effectively sift through the amount of data coming from the modern plant floor and find real, valuable quality intelligence, there are essential pillars that manufacturers first need to have in place: standardization, centralized data, and prioritization.

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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.

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The Total Cost of Effective Budgeting and Forecasting

Plans, budgets, and forecasts can be some of the most valuable contributions that finance makes to the business. Ideally, they help organizations know what’s coming down the road and remain agile enough to respond to uncertainty and to keep the business moving forward. The goal of these processes is to produce planning, budgeting, and forecasting that help provide guidance and decision-making support for the business. The key consideration is not necessarily how much organizations are spending on the process, but instead whether organizations are making better decisions. When FP&A plays a strong business partnering role and is in frequent conversations with the business, the challenges, opportunities, and pain points of plans, budgets, and forecasts become visible quickly.

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Why an Outcome-Driven Enterprise Data Strategy is Critical for Decision Making

A business cannot be successful without the processes to manage data and gain insightful analytics from it. Some processes can be automated via business rules, while others still require manual input. Whatever the approach, it’s important that data management processes are as simple, automated, and designed according to standards specific to the organization. Data life-cycle processes are critical to decision makers because they are a key component of any outcome-driven business strategy. The volume of data and enterprise landscape complexity are growing, and poor data processes often lead to poor data quality and unfounded decision making. Business can create a successful outcome-driven enterprise data strategy that is unmatched by combining a data life-cycle process with the right tools and technologies that provides actionable and real-time business insight.

A well-implemented data management system enables businesses to gain insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational efficiency. It helps businesses make informed decisions based on reliable and accurate data, leading to better performance, reduced risk, and increased profitability.

To achieve efficient data management, businesses must first define their data requirements and establish data governance policies that ensure data is consistent, secure, and accessible to authorized users. This includes selecting appropriate data management tools and technologies, such as data warehouses, Name Matching, data lakes, and data analytics software, that align with their specific needs and goals.

By prioritizing data management, businesses and companies can leverage the power of data to drive innovation, streamline operations, and stay competitive in today’s fast-paced and data-driven marketplace.

Achieve Business Process Optimization with End-to-End Visibility

Many businesses have found that their existing business processes have simply outlived the intended reason for which they were initially designed. Once business leaders realize the way they are doing business is not effective or profitable, they seek ways to improve and optimize their existing processes. This search for workflow optimization is prompted by a very real need to improve productivity and operational efficiency – a need that is evident across all business segments and vertical industries. Most can easily identify areas where improved efficiency is needed, but without a clear understanding of the problem, there is a general reluctance to simply throw time, money, and resources at a solution. The key is to implement a tool that can help the business clearly identify the issue and potential solutions.

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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.

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Modern Technologies Are Critical for The Success of Midsize Businesses

Businesses that are not making digital transformation a priority have a much greater risk of going out of business in the next decade than those that are. Why? Successful digital transformation allows businesses to operate with a level of agility necessary to adapt to a marketplace that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The rising intelligence of enterprise technologies presents tremendous opportunities for midsize businesses to outpace the rest of their competition. However, their growth depends on the strength of a unified modern data platform, which is critical for turning data into insight. Finance and IT leaders must create a strong foundation of connected, real-time data that is integrated enterprise-wide and provides the necessary visibility for decision makers to ultimately maximize profit growth.

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Simulation Capabilities Are Giving Manufacturers A Major Advantage

Simulation capabilities are being used by manufacturers everywhere to help decision makers understand what has happened or will happen in the future of their business. In the case of additive manufacturing, simulating the material properties and the processes embedded in devices, helps OEMs guarantee that they have the right combination of material and settings to manufacture the necessary part. This ensures the part strength, support structure, and other key requirements will be met so that the part will be successfully produced. Finance departments use simulations for scenario analysis and planning. They want to answer the questions, “what will happen if…?” and be prepared for potential outcomes. With manufacturers focusing more on financial planning & analytics functions to drive their strategies, they need the ability to confidently and accurately predict the impact of internal and external changes on both costs and profits.

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