What Makes a Strategic CFO?

Strategic CFOs harness the power of technology to understand the “why” behind their numbers and use that information to solve complex business challenges faster. They possess the skills to manage rapidly changing technological processes, and they keep up with the ever-changing business landscape of their competitors. As innovations like AI and predictive analytics become more prevalent in finance, successful leaders must ensure their teams build a new skill set – met decision making. Modern CFOs help drive the direction and success of their organization and ensure business decisions are based on solid financial data.

Read More at Forbes Magazine >

Intelligent Technologies Are Revolutionizing Finance In Midsize Businesses

Midsize businesses across virtually every industry are actively adopting new technologies to drive better insights that support business strategy. However, recent IDC research suggests that only 50.2% of best-run midsize companies are supported by finance organizations that understand the power of data when ensuring timeliness, accuracy, and insight. Additionally, the research found that the biggest challenge for best-run midsize companies is the inability to provide timely financial insight relevant to decision makers in other departments across the enterprise. The biggest reason for this is that many finance organizations still subscribe to maintaining a growing inventory of spreadsheets, disconnected data sources, and manually created reports. To remain competitive, these businesses must be proactive about transforming their finance function with technologies that enable long-term growth.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Creating Business Advantages from Variances

Variance analysis is a crucial for business leaders to gain insights into performance while improving future planning efforts. The key to identifying variances is having access to an end-to-end view of business processes in real-time.  An organization is rarely successful when they lack the proper tools to evaluate how the business is performing and the ability to drill-down into their data to identify the root cause of variances. In today’s volatile marketplace, managers need to not only understand the variations in data, but also be able to measure business impact and make the necessary changes in a timely manner. Identifying and understanding data variations allows managers to make more powerful predictions, establish control, and improve performance while gaining a major competitive advantage.

Read More at The Harvard Business Review >

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 >

The Path to Manufacturing Innovation is Paved With Exponential Technologies

“The velocity of technology advancement, especially for the manufacturing industry, is exponential.”

Exponential technologies provide the scalability that modern businesses often lack with their legacy technologies and outdated practices. Industrial manufacturers are focusing on these technologies as a foundational approach to innovation across both products and processes. In this era of rapidly accelerating transformation, organizations of all types must develop the ability to innovate rapidly, or get left behind by the competition. Today’s manufacturing is focused on technology-driven innovation that enables businesses to build new capabilities and develop new products and services. Exponential technologies have the capability to optimize processes and controls across production and operations, providing manufacturers with a major advantage.

Read More from Deloitte Insights >

Intelligent Scenario Planning with Advanced Analytics

Nobody understands Robert Burns’ quote, “The best laid plans often go awry,” like modern business leaders. When it comes to financial planning, finance teams need the ability to assess and adjust plans when they go off course. Intelligent planning starts with analysis of past results to help determine where is business is going, and measure future success. However, most planning processes are tangled in static spreadsheet processes that are error prone and limit agility. Modern businesses are leveraging intelligent technologies that provide the most up-to-date insight by analyzing the actual data being used by the systems of record. This enables users to react to analytic results in the context of their business process or workflow by creating scenarios that provide the insight to make strategic decisions.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Success is Utilizing the Right Data – Not Just Owning It

“No matter how much data is fed to machine learning and predictive analytics tools, the key is deciding which outputs are useful and how to act on them.”

When it comes to implementing new technologies, many businesses go through what Gartner calls a “hype cycle”- where the initial implementation is a period of inflated expectations that  becomes a “slope of enlightenment” once people begin to find practical uses for the technology, and finally develops into an extended “plateau of productivity”, where the actual value of the tool is realized. Today, technology itself will not provide a competitive advantage. How a business leverages their tools to gain meaningful business insight and what they do with that knowledge will define their success. With the rise of digital transformation and innovation, beating out competitors will come down to visibility, judgement, knowledge, strategy and approach.

Read More at CFO Magazine >

The Power of Cost Transparency

“The effectiveness of cost information is driven less by the cost method chosen, and more by the design and implementation of the cost allocation model used to support that method.”

While many businesses effectively analyze their revenue based on products, services, and customers, they often lack meaningful insight into their costs and profits. Companies with a disparate array of financial systems and costing methods find it extremely challenging to understand their financial data and achieve cost transparency. Getting cost data to a more granular level is one of the keys to arming managers with the insights they need to support strategic decision making that goes beyond what is necessary for financial reporting or inventory valuation. To improve overall performance, finance leaders need to make changes to how costs are captured and then harmonize both data and allocation models across the organization.

Read More at Deloitte >

Better Business Decisions Come From Effective Data Visualization

Data visualization can greatly improve finance’s ability to view how the business is performing by providing access to key metrics, KPIs, forecasts, and other critical information that can aid decision-making and help each function chart effective courses of action. However, those goals depend heavily on quality data. Thanks to an expanding array of analytics tools and emerging cognitive technologies, finance is also able to leverage that data to attain meaningful insights that can influence a range of tactical and strategic decisions.

Read More at CFO Insights by Deloitte >