Finance Transformation Consulting

Optimising cost and efficiency

The role of the modern Finance function is fast evolving to support and enable the ever-increasing pace of business change. Although the drive to optimise the cost and efficiency of finance never goes away, the role of the function to drive business value also becomes ever more important - operating as a true business partner to enable growth and drive cost efficiency right across the business.

In our experience, some key themes driving change for the modern finance function include:

• Faster close: enabling less time to be spent on the mechanics of the reporting cycle, and more on business support and business partnering.
• Automation of controls: the majority of controls in many organisations are still highly manual, although there is clear movement towards greater automation, particularly as new technologies (such as Robotic Process Automation) may offer some significant potential to go further in this respect.
• Finance efficiency and reducing data gathering in favour of data analysis: often linked to faster close, many organisations are trying to rebalance their effort to spend less time on gathering and validating suitably high quality data, in favour of releasing more time to invest in analysis and insight. And, of course, the overall focus on  finance efficiency - considering basic ‘top down’ metrics such as finance function costs as a percentage of turnover - remains important as companies seek to maximise the value of their finance headcount and location strategy (linking to many of the other themes discussed here).
• Finance structure and effective business partnering: Finance is fast adapting to partner the changing face of business, and to continue to drive efficiency and value. Streamlining across group / corporate finance and federated finance teams (at business unit or country level) continues apace, and the historic lines between financial, management and commercial finance roles may start to blur.
• Finance shared services: there continues to be significant evolution of finance shared services, whether that’s driven by expanding scope and remit; responding to merger and acquisition activity; changing the insource vs outsource supply mix; seeking further advantage from low cost location strategies; or integrating into a multi-functional shared service environment.
• Finance data, analytics & insight: the world of traditional reporting is being transformed by modern analytics tools and techniques (such as data visualisation). Modern tools empower much greater business self service which is democratising access to information, allowing greater rationalisation of reporting, and changing the role of Finance. The Big Data revolution is also transforming the business’s appetite and expectations of their access to information (in terms of quality, quantity and timeliness) and the level of insight and value they expect to drive from it. In many businesses, the Finance function has a key role in information and data (especially master data) that extends well outside the remit of pure finance data, making this area all the more important.
• Finance technology: traditional finance Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are being transformed by technology advances, such as in-memory computing which may enable much closer integration of budgeting and forecasting with actuals processing, potentially changing the role of the Financial Planning and Accounting (FP&A) function. Delivering key Finance applications via the Cloud is also becoming more commonplace, to unlock greater agility and reduced cost of ownership, despite the security and control challenges that may be perceived. Finally, Robotic Process Automation is being considered by many due the potential it may offer to unlock the next wave of finance automation and efficiency.
• We have helped our clients transform and succeed in all these areas and more. We can help you both with defining the strategy for your Finance function, or with delivery of the change you need to achieve it.

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