Finance Transformation

Turning a finance function from an administrator of figures to a strategic business partner takes a lot more than just the best strategies, systems and tools: employees and managers are crucial for long-term success. On the one hand, they need to be inspired to actively shape their new roles in the organisation’s future profile; on the other hand, it’s vital that humans and machines can work together in harmony, and company management plays a leading role in promoting this. As the importance of digital tools in shaping the future of finance functions rises, so too does the importance of ensuring that humans are ultimately in control. Digital upskilling and development programmes tailored to specific user groups enable all concerned to develop the mindsets, skillsets and toolsets they need. Internal training can create completely new job profiles, such as digital architects, agile coaches and scrum masters.

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The future is becoming more important for CFOs than the past. Disruptive changes in numerous sectors and industries are making it essential to examine, in even more detail than before, what might happen tomorrow, next year and in five years’ time if companies are to succeed. Areas of focus include issues such as how the global crisis triggered by COVID-19 might change the macroeconomic and microeconomic environment, and which key factors might further affect business. Meanwhile, control structures must be able to provide information required here and now, starting by defining key questions for successful, forward-looking corporate management. These questions then need to be translated into measurable key performance indicators (KPIs), and their internal and external value drivers need to be analysed on a global level. Non-financial value drivers also need to be included. Using predictive analytics, this approach enables companies to make well-founded future predictions and allows high levels of automation in all management-related processes – planning, forecasting, reporting and consolidation. 

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When it comes to regulation and compliance, most companies tend to focus on regulatory requirements. What this means in practice is that regulatory requirements are met, but many other demands placed on companies by society are not factored into corporate strategy and processes. Hence, good corporate governance will be more dependent on societal, legal policy and capital market driven perceptions than today and just complying with regulatory requirements will not be sufficient.Companies will  need to be able to achieve rapid, targeted integration of these requirements into their business processes. On top of this, they have to consider which tasks can be allocated to the various sections of their finance functions – e.g. tax, treasury. Non-financial factors are important in this process; they have been proven to have a positive effect on company success, reputation and access to finance.

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The future is digital, but finance functions are still largely analogue: a joint survey by PwC and the Handelsblatt revealed that 53% of staff capacity in finance functions is used for manual tasks such as filling in spreadsheets, checking receipts and adapting reports. In order to become strategic business partners, finance functions need an organisational structure that takes an end-to-end view of processes and aims for holistic transactional excellence. This involves a significant and targeted increase of automation and integration of finance processes. Combined with in-depth understanding of finance processes (using techniques such as process mining), transactional excellence harnesses enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, robotic process automation (RPA), tool-based workflows and machine learning to digitalise finance function activities – including more complex tasks. The focus here is to consider the solutions in their overall context, avoiding the silo mentality often found in process design and enabling the solutions to deliver holistic benefits.

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CFOs always need rapid insights into key data for decision-making. Ideally, this data will be captured in a central ERP system without any data inconsistencies or transmission errors. The latest systems can perform complex analyses such as SAP S/4HANA directly within the system – in real time, across departments, customised to your needs and intuitively accessible from mobile devices. Using the ERP system as a basis, you can add further automation as required, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). This allows CFOs to access key data for decision-making at any time. Robots have already been developed to search databases for KPI-related information, compile reports in Excel and communicate with stakeholders by email.

We provide companies with provider-neutral advice on selecting and implementing the right ERP solution, including:

• SAP S/4HANA
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition
• Data Validation Solution
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Workday
• LucaNet
• Haven’t decided yet?

Control structures need to be capable of providing the information that managers need here and now. However, structures and data models vary considerably from one source system to another. This makes comprehensive data analysis much harder, which in turn makes it harder to identify a consistent action plan. The finance office of the future needs an overarching concept that brings together heterogeneous source systems, enables the creation of dynamic data models and a uniform business intelligence (BI) platform, and at the same time provides a reliable database. The benchmark along the way is how easily users can access the information and perform analyses on their own.

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