By transforming your Finance function, you will improve the competitiveness of your entire business even faster.
Together, we will help you get the most out of the race for the future by making the Finance department an even stronger business partner. Trust in Transformation.
In most companies, Finance is currently undergoing a major transformation: from a mere administrator of figures and retrospective observer to a business partner and enabler for the business of tomorrow. Times of crisis in particular require Finance to take on an increasingly central, strategic role in the company.
The CFO’s office is a place where crucial pieces of information on the company’s core business come together. The CFO is responsible for evaluating opportunities and risks created by external drivers, developing realistic scenarios, and introducing specific measures throughout the firm. In terms of controlling, this means companies can only fulfil their core tasks if they are in a position to locate key opportunities and risks and proactively identify new paths.
This makes the CFO a quality controller and forward-looking planner – an authority that must be able to guarantee a secure future for the company in various different scenarios. Digital technology is enabling CFOs to meet this demand more effectively than ever before.
Making this paradigm shift requires a quantum leap on four levels: increased efficiency through automation; quicker reporting and responses to enquiries; fundamental developments in ways of working and presenting information; and rapidly learning how to handle bulk data, with automated planning and forecasting playing a key role.
“The future is becoming more important for finance departments than the past. Disruptive changes in numerous sectors and industries are making it essential to examine what might happen tomorrow, next year and in five years’ time.”
In our podcast “Leading Corporate Transformation” by WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management and PwC Germany, Prof. Dr. Serden Ozcan, Prof. Dr. Martin Glaum (both WHU) and Gori von Hirschhausen (PwC) provide authentic insights into transformation projects at a wide range of companies, described from different C-level perspectives of top European executives, highlighted with scientific findings.
Integrated collaboration and a common vision are crucial success factors in a transformation like this – and our integrated finance transformation team can help ensure seamless integration of all your sub-projects across the whole value chain of a finance transformation. The best place to start with transforming your Finance function will vary, depending on the status quo of your company. But there’s one thing all transformation projects share: The time to start is now. Transform your tomorrow.t’s time to start today – to transform your tomorrow.
When starting the transformation to Finance 4.0, there are several key questions to be answered: What should Finance look like in the next two, five or ten years? What is state-of-the-art? What is possible and how can it be achieved? For this individual journey, we develop a customised “digital roadmap” together with our clients, tailored to the company’s needs. The complexity and design of this roadmap are largely determined by the company’s structure and the industry in question. Another important consideration before transforming Finance from a number cruncher into a strategic business partner is to define which tasks should be handled by Finance in the future. For this purpose, we will work with you to develop a target operating model (TOM). This takes into account all relevant dimensions– from process architecture and technology to your employees. The ultimate goal is the rapid and comprehensive implementation of digital technologies, a common “digital level” for all employees, and thus a Finance function that serves the core business efficiently and effectively.
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Turning Finance into a strategic business partner will take 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 as part of the corporate culture plays a leading role in promoting this. The more digital tools determine the figures and the future of Finance functions, the more important it gets to ensure that people are ultimately in control.
Digital upskilling and development programmes tailored to specific user groups enable everyone involved to develop the mindsets, skillsets and toolsets needed. 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 Finance departments than the past. Disruptive changes in numerous sectors and industries are making it essential to examine in detail what might happen tomorrow, next year and in five years’ time. 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, financial dashboards 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 is that regulatory requirements are met, but numerous social requirements now go well beyond this and are not integrated into corporate strategy and processes. Meeting regulatory requirements alone will not be enough in the future. To meet the diverse requirements of various stakeholders from society, politics and the capital market, companies face the challenge of continuously having to anticipate relevant regulatory and non-regulatory requirements. At the same time, they should be able to integrate them into their business processes in a timely and targeted manner. In this context, it must also be considered which tasks can be allocated to the various sections of Finance, e.g. tax, treasury, etc. Non-financial factors are also important in this process – they have been proven to have a positive effect on company success, reputation, and access to capital.
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The future is digital, but the current world of finance is still largely analogue:
A joint survey by PwC and Handelsblatt revealed that 53 percent of staff capacity in Finance is used for manual activities such as Excel 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 in automated and integrated finance processes. Combined with in-depth understanding of finance processes (using techniques such as process mining), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, robotic process automation (RPA), tool-based workflows and machine learning are used to make even highly complex activities in the finance sector digitally manageable. The focus is always to consider the implemented solutions in their overall context, avoiding the silo mentality often found in process design and enabling the development of holistic rather than selective effects.
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Key building block and opportunity for finance transformation
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 directly within the system, e.g. SAP S/4HANA – in real time, across departments, customised to your needs, intuitively, and accessible from mobile devices. Using the ERP system as a basis, companies can add further automations as required, for example with 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:
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Control structures need to be capable of providing the information that management needs 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 develop consistent measures. The Finance office of the future needs an overarching concept that brings together diverse 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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