Como melhorar a direção financeira, mais rápida e mais eficiente

Para dirigir suas empresas através da volatilidade e da incerteza de hoje, é imperativo que as funções financeiras tenham o seu papel como adventores estratégicos e de avanço. Dois recursos de direção relacionados - planejamento dinâmico e inteligência de negócios avançada - são facilitadores críticos disso função aprimorada . O planejamento financeiro dinâmico fornece uma visão abrangente baseada no motorista do desempenho futuro potencial, acelerando a capacidade de uma empresa de sentir e responder a um cenário comercial em mudança. Os recursos avançados de inteligência de negócios permitem análises em tempo real do desempenho histórico e futuro.

Com maior visibilidade e melhor planejamento de cenários, as empresas podem melhorar seu monitoramento de operações, mercados e clientes e podem permitir a tomada de decisão mais rápida e mais informada. Empresas de qualquer tamanho ou setor podem implantar rapidamente testes de prova de conceito de novas soluções e capturar o valor do material no curto prazo, enquanto a criação de recursos a longo prazo.

Several building blocks are required to accomplish this step change in Excelência na função financeira . As empresas devem criar uma lógica de negócios baseada no motorista que conecte métricas estratégicas, financeiras e operacionais e implemente ferramentas digitais e mecanismos de visualização. O sucesso também exige ter ciclos de planejamento mais curtos, uma plataforma de dados centrais e uma nova estratégia de talentos. Dado o escopo, é fundamental coordenar efetivamente um esforço multidisciplinar em finanças, negócios e tecnologia.

O ambiente de hoje exige novos recursos de direção

As empresas precisam de planejamento mais preciso e ágil e inteligência de negócios mais acionável para enfrentar os desafios do ambiente econômico de hoje. Eles enfrentam uma combinação sem precedentes de intensa pressão da cadeia de suprimentos, alta inflação, baixo desemprego, aumento das taxas de juros e conflitos políticos globais. Para orientar a tomada de decisão em meio à incerteza, as empresas devem entender como diferentes cenários afetarão o desempenho operacional e financeiro. Os profissionais financeiros se sentirão fortalecidos se gastarem mais tempo em análises de valor agregado e suporte à decisão, em vez de extração e manipulação de dados. Além disso, dados mais precisos e precisos permitem que os CFOs sejam consultores estratégicos verdadeiros para os negócios e estejam melhor preparados para as reuniões dos investidores. análises. Isso é ativado através de ferramentas de planejamento modernas que automatizam o processo e melhoram a precisão. As ferramentas estão conectadas a uma plataforma de dados centralizada que serve como uma única fonte de verdade. As empresas substituem os relatórios estáticos do Excel por painéis dinâmicos que os usuários de toda a organização podem acessar via autoatendimento.

An advanced approach to planning and business intelligence also helps to attract and retain top talent. Finance professionals will feel empowered if they spend more time on value-added analyses and decision support instead of data extraction and manipulation. In addition, more precise and accurate data allows CFOs to be true strategic advisors to the business and be better prepared for investor meetings.

To capture these benefits, finance functions need two types of enhanced capabilities:

• Dynamic financial planning and forecasting involve creating a comprehensive view of future outcomes more rapidly, using driver-based logic and scenario analyses. This is enabled through modern planning tools that automate the process and improve accuracy. The tools are connected to a centralized data platform that serves as a single source of truth.
• Advanced business intelligence enables real-time analyses of historical and future performance to understand patterns, link financial and operational metrics, and determine root causes. Companies replace static Excel reports with dynamic dashboards that users across the organization can access via self-service.

Recursos aprimorados fornecem benefícios significativos

Esses recursos aprimorados tornam a direção melhor, mais rápida e mais eficiente. Isso melhora a qualidade e a eficiência da tomada de decisão e fortalece a parceria estratégica com os líderes empresariais. A empresa conseguiu melhorar a rotatividade de estoque em comparação com os níveis pré -ndêmicos em 15%, estabelecer preços no nível da localização e repensar como as lojas medem a produtividade. Ele alcançou esses impactos por:

Better

The advanced approach allows the finance function to focus on drivers that influence the metrics that matter most to the business, such as growth, margins, and shareholder returns. This improves both the quality and the efficiency of decision making and strengthens the strategic partnership with business leaders.

A major US department store chain implemented dynamic planning and advanced business intelligence to respond to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was able to improve inventory turnover compared with prepandemic levels by 15%, set location-level prices, and rethink how stores measure productivity. It achieved these impacts by:

• Giving finance and business partners the ability to drill down into historical performance on a driver basis, which provided information for discounting and purchasing decisions
• Presenting consolidated dashboards with cross-functional metrics—such as for sales, inventory, margin, credit card spending, and demand—that visualize KPIs and trends for decision making
• Integrating algorithmic models of sales, demand, and other metrics into the financial-forecasting process to improve predictive power
• Empowering the finance team to pressure-test how business partners run their operations—for example, using scenario-based analysis to test the implications of changing specific operational factors

Faster

Producing and updating plans, budgets, and forecasts requires significantly less time and enables agile decision making. The department store company shortened the lead time for producing forecasts to one week from the customary three to four weeks. It now updates performance dashboards in real time and produces full management reports in a few hours, versus two to four weeks in the past.

More Efficient

Finance functions that modernize their planning and business intelligence can often become 15% to 20% more efficient by reducing the amount of time spent extracting, manipulating, and reconciling data. The department store’s finance function decreased the share of its time spent on these low-value tasks from 60% to 80% in the past to less than 20%. This freed up finance professionals to spend more time on business advisory activities.

Five Building Blocks

Implementation of the new capabilities requires establishing five building blocks: driver-based business logic, digital tools, simplified processes, data platforms, and redesigned talent and operating models.

Driver-based Business Logic

Each company needs a solid understanding of its business logic—that is, the drivers of performance and a structure for analisando os resultados. Dois recursos são essenciais:

• A driver-tree logic that links financial KPIs (for example, total revenue, the cost of goods sold, and net income) with operational KPIs (such as the hourly labor rate, capacity utilization, and number of truck routes needed). Companies can use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models (advanced demand models, for instance) as inputs for the drivers. The finance function uses driver trees to explain the results, establish the causality, identify the root causes, and plan the next steps.
• The ability to slice and dice views of KPIs along the dimensions that are most helpful to the business. Each business unit may need varying levels of granularity for each KPI, and some business units might want to see different data cuts for each plan and forecast.

A US luxury department store developed driver trees for all key line items in the P&L statement, including sales, merchandise costs, supply chain costs, and SG&A expenses. Exhibit 1 illustrates the driver tree for variable labor in stores and how a company can leverage automatic and manual inputs.

Digital Tools and Visualization Engines

After establishing the business logic, finance functions need to configure digital-planning tools and visualization engines that allow teams to examine what-if scenarios, interpret the results, develop actionable insights, and define plans. Financial-planning tools (such as Anaplan and OneStream) and visualization engines (including Tableau and Power BI) are examples of modern cloud-based tools that are transforming traditional finance processes. Exhibit 2 shows a sample dynamic dashboard that visualizes real-time data and enables analyses by stakeholders across the organization.

As ferramentas digitais devem fornecer os seguintes recursos:

• dados ao vivo. Connect tools directly to the single source of truth and automatically update data feeds as changes occur.
• Drill-Down and Roll-Up Ability. Permite que os usuários dêem a drivers operacionais e enrole resultados para várias dimensões do negócio (por exemplo, custos agregados por tipo de armazenamento ou linha de produtos).
• A Comparações de resultados. tempo. Provide the ability to compare a selected period of plans and forecasts with the actual results in real time.
• Auto-serviço. Dê ao acesso às partes interessadas nos negócios a todos os dados de que precisam e permitir que eles configurem facilmente as visualizações de planejamento.
• Análise de cenário. Modelagem. O modelo integrou múltiplas fontes de dados externas para prever melhor os padrões de compra do cliente e para ficar "mais inteligente" ao detectar a demanda ao longo do tempo. A empresa integrou o modelo aos processos regulares de planejamento operacional e de planejamento financeiro, para garantir que seus insights informe as decisões diárias de tomada de decisão e alocação de recursos. Eles podem aplicar automação para reduzir os processos de planejamento, orçamento e previsão. Além disso, a previsão frequente com planejamento e orçamento detalhados ocasionais permitem que as empresas maximizem a visibilidade e o controle sobre operações, minimizando a quantidade de tempo gasto no processo de planejamento anual. As empresas também podem aumentar a eficiência, melhorando os pontos de contato com o alinhamento com a liderança sênior e quebrando os silos organizacionais para coordenar melhor o planejamento financeiro e operacional. Allow users to plan for potential scenarios (for example, a recession, high inflation, or supply chain disruptions) and accelerate responses by simulating what would happen if certain market conditions change.
• AI/ML Modeling. Incorporate AI/ML models (such as for customer demand and sales) to improve the accuracy of planning and forecasting and estimate the operational and financial impacts of potential decisions.

A US retailer created an ML engine to improve its ability to sense demand and respond rapidly to customer needs. The model integrated multiple external data sources to better predict customer buying patterns and to get “smarter” at sensing demand over time. The company integrated the model into regular operational and financial-planning processes, to ensure that its insights inform daily decision making and resource allocation decisions.

Simplified Processes

To effectively run the digital tools using the new business logic, finance functions need to rethink their processes. They can apply automation to shorten planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. In addition, frequent forecasting with occasional detailed planning and budgeting allows companies to maximize visibility into, and control over, operations while minimizing the amount of time spent on the annual planning process. Companies can also boost efficiency by improving alignment touch points with senior leadership and breaking down organizational silos to better coordinate financial and operational planning.

Para permitir a adoção de previsões algorítmicas acionadas por IA, a unidade de negócios de leasing de um fabricante automotivo necessário para substituir seu processo tradicional de previsão de baixo para cima. O novo processo incluiu pontos de contato de alinhamento que permitiram aos líderes ajustar as previsões algorítmicas manualmente aplicando seus conhecimentos, seguidos por sessões de estratégia para simular o impacto de fazer alterações nas alavancas estratégicas (como índices de dívida). A adoção completa da previsão algorítmica permitiu que a empresa mudasse da análise retrospectiva dos resultados anteriores para a identificação proativa de ações e seu provável impacto na linha inferior. (Consulte o Anexo 3.) Para fazer uso eficaz do repositório de dados, as empresas devem executar as seguintes ações:

A Central Finance Data Platform

To feed digital tools and calculation engines, companies should establish a data repository (for example, a data warehouse and data lake) as the single source of truth. (See Exhibit 3.) To make effective use of the data repository, companies must take the following actions:

• Develop a business glossary or data dictionary to standardize the metric definitions used by teams. For example, stores and supply chain groups should use the same definition of “returned items.”
• Designate the business events (such as store sales, online sales, and returns) that trigger the flow of data from source systems into the data platform in a standardized format. Establish procedures to ensure that consistent and high-quality data flows into the platform—for example, by conducting unit tests to check for outliers.
• Create a centralized data management function responsible for ensuring that the data flowing out of the platform is complete, accurate, and consistent so that it can be used for analyses that support decision making.
• Establish integration mechanisms (for example, application programming interfaces and data pipelines) to connect the data repository with best-of-breed planning and visualization applications, such as Anaplan and Power BI.
• Implemente os fluxos de trabalho (como reconciliação de dados) que aproveitam os feeds automatizados de dados e minimizam o trabalho manual.

talento aprimorado

Companies need to identify the new competencies required to manage dynamic planning and advanced business intelligence. They must upskill the current workforce (to use new tools and conduct scenario analyses, for example) as well as hire people for new roles (such as data scientists and configuration specialists for finance tools). A center of excellence should oversee any future changes to the new digital tools and ensure that they are being used to their full potential.

Leading organizations are addressing this imperative aggressively; many see it as especially urgent given the intense competition for digitally savvy talent. A global health care company transformed its talent strategy to support changes to its digital tools and operating model. This included upskilling people within the finance organization through formal training in key skills, updating the skills (such as coding and scenario modeling) required for each role, and expanding career paths to prioritize diverse, skill-based experiences. This upgraded approach is driving a greatly enhanced employee value proposition, which helps the company attract and retain the best talent.

Key Success Factors

Although the concepts behind dynamic planning and advanced business intelligence are not overly complex, many companies struggle to implement them successfully. For organizations to achieve full value, it is crucial that they set appropriately bold ambitions for progressing through the journey and think holistically about the required changes concerning people, processes, and technologies. Companies can use a diagnostic to understand their starting point. For example, BCG’s Índice de Excelência em CFO Os benchmarks de um desempenho de uma função financeira ao longo das dimensões, como financiamento e sistemas, planejamento e previsão e inteligência de negócios.

Five success factors are crucial for implementation:

• Cross-Functional Collaboration. Embora as equipes de finanças possuam a transformação geral, a execução bem -sucedida exige a participação de equipes de negócios e tecnologia também. As equipes precisam de responsabilidades claras em design, dados, construção, configuração, teste e lançamento.
• Change and Project Management. Establish dedicated teams that can drive implementation by helping to remove any roadblocks during execution and promote the adoption of the new solutions across the finance organization.
• Two-Speed Implementation. Demonstrar entrega rápida de valor (como a construção de painéis em sprints) enquanto desenvolve recursos fundamentais (uma plataforma de dados, por exemplo) em segundo plano. Iniciativa.
• Senior Sponsorship. For a transformation to gain the most traction, it should be led by the CFO and senior business executives and treated as a key strategic initiative.
• Alterações rápidas do processo. As funções financeiras podem gerar previsões em dias, em vez de semanas e preparar planos e orçamentos em semanas em vez de meses. As equipes financeiras podem evitar gastar mais de 70% de seu tempo em processos manuais. As partes interessadas nos negócios podem ter acesso a todas as informações necessárias na ponta dos dedos. Por fim, as funções financeiras terão processos mais econômicos que permitem decisões melhores e mais rápidas, permitindo-lhes dirigir o negócio com maior confiança e previsão. Para enfrentar os desafios do ambiente de negócios atual, as empresas devem atuar agora para tornar o futuro da direção financeira uma realidade. Parceiro; Líder de NAMR da Excelência em CFO Shut down legacy processes, such as Excel-based planning, as soon as possible to encourage full adoption of the new tools.

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Dynamic financial planning and advanced business intelligence promise to be transformative. Finance functions can generate forecasts in days instead of weeks and prepare plans and budgets in weeks instead of months. Finance teams can avoid spending more than 70% of their time on manual processes. Business stakeholders can have access to all necessary information at their fingertips. Ultimately, finance functions will have more cost-efficient processes that enable better and faster decisions, allowing them to steer the business with greater confidence and foresight. To meet the challenges of the current business environment, companies must act now to make the future of financial steering a reality.