Finance Transformation

Finance Transformation - Interim Consulting Services  

In 2012 Finance Transformation is back on the menu… namely cost control, business performance improvement & cash.

With continued uncertainty over the future of the Euro, weakened demand and on-going pressure on margins, the majority of CFOs as surveyed by Deloitte in their Q4 2011 CFO survey are re-focused on cost cutting and increasing cash flow.

However as per findings from the CBI’s autumn survey, corporates are placing IT at the heart of their business performance and cost control strategies. Investment in IT is set to increase at the expense of other capital expenditure such as land & buildings.

Nearly 20% of CFOs in Deloitte’s survey, believe that the difficult economic environment predicted in 2012 will help them to implement overdue changes to their business and 30% believe that weaker competition provides a chance to expand market share.

IT enabled finance & business transformation is back on the agenda.

For those businesses with a significant footprint outside of Europe and the UK, transformation programmes may have a more strategic flavour, enabling quicker assimilation of acquisitions or new revenue streams, through simplified global ERP, for instance.

UK focused businesses are more likely to adopt a more defensive strategy in the year ahead and as such tactical transformation projects are a key focus. This includes initiatives such as chart of accounts & GL rationalisation, data standardisation and the implementation of data mining & analytics tools to improve visibility over costs & supplier metrics, and insight in to trends across the customer landscape.

Some sectors, financial services in particular, continue to face regulatory change, such as Basel III and Solvency II, driving further business transformation throughout the year ahead.

 Value creation

Traditionally Finance transformation has focused on either one of two key goals. Firstly cost reduction, through process automation & the removal of duplicated tasks, or secondly on improving effectiveness for example, achieving faster cycle times, improving accuracy and providing better business intelligence.

Cost reduction and effectiveness however do not have to be mutually exclusive objectives.

Finance transformation is an on-going exercise. Savings made through process automation and ERP simplification can be reinvested into areas such as analytics and the re-skilling of key finance staff to support the provision of more insightful MI.

Who best but the finance team to model and interpret new trends and to inject financial discipline in to the exploration and understanding of new commercial opportunities.

Big data

Furthermore it is now widely accepted that the finance function has a key role to play as the owner and champion of enterprise wide data quality, data standards and consistency.

Financial control and analysis disciplines place finance in a unique and increasingly pivotal position in respect to the analysis, interpretation and reporting on a wide variety of non-financial information, to support value creation and comply with new regulations.

Data governance and the enabling data warehousing and BI tools are a fundamental component of successful finance transformation.

Finance Transformation

 Hybrid Expertise – Finance Transformation Contractors

Finance                 |               IT             |               Change Management        |               Project Management

Now more than ever the demand for finance professionals who have a deep awareness of finance systems & ERP architecture and practical experience of change management and project delivery; remains on the rise.

Whilst the mainstream systems integrators and Big 4 Consultancies maintain significant talent pools of such professionals many organisations now prefer to blend their consulting engagements with a healthy mix of Interim Finance project specialists.      

The reasons for this are threefold:

SystemsAccountants – Finance Transformation - Cost effective delivery

SystemsAccountants has specialised in providing interim and permanent resource to lead and deliver both tactical and strategic finance transformation projects since 1997.

Having mobilised countless ERP delivery and finance projects teams, often to bolster client teams and thus facilitate engagement with SI resources, we have a thorough appreciation of the political dynamics of multi-supplier projects.

Our own engagement model is geared to working with client or SI PMOs and our internal account managers have developed deep expertise in the supply of specialist resources to project environments, helping to smooth the peaks and troughs of resource demand throughout the lifecycle of the initiative.

With opportunities for growth in short supply and the resultant focus back on cost control, the need for visibility and operational efficiency are critical. Finance transformation whether strategic or tactical is a key tool in unlocking these benefits.

SystemsAccountants offer a tried and trusted way to keep the cost of consulting engagements in check. Through a blended resource mix and the application of creative and flexible commercial terms, the business case to initiate or continue finance transformation can be made much more compelling.  

Initiatives that we have helped resource have ranged from tactical projects such as Chart of accounts re-design and Finance Process re-engineering, though to full project resource supply to Finance Transformation projects and Finance Transformation programmes.