As CFOs safeguard now, how can they reframe beyond?

The world is moving fast. If organizations want to stay ahead of the curve, their operations need to be agile and predictive, and they must pick the right time to engage with both the right talent and the right new technologies to gain a competitive edge.

However, there are a lot of technologies out there and a lot of business processes, all in a state of continuous evolution. Separating the signal from the noise – and picking the right strategy – can be a real challenge.

Even when organizations choose a strategy, other factors can stand in the way of effective implementation. Understanding how to ask the right questions, who to ask and where to find the answers, is critical in making any strategy work.

Take, for example, the challenges around digital transformation.

Digital transformation is a vital component of any modern business strategy. Old software, platforms and processes become unfit for modern needs. In their place, new software, new platforms and new processes need to be developed and efficiently implemented.

However, transformation is often driven by technologists and IT teams, rather than the people who they will actually impact – such as those on the office floor. This can make communicating business value and enacting effective change a fraught process.

Finding fresh perspectives meant the client needed to bring together the right expertise. For large multinational organizations, these conversations can be hard to create and sustain – teams can be widely distributed around the world, business functions may be highly siloed and individuals may keep varying hours. Bringing stakeholders together physically – and giving them the tools to succeed – was critical.

Building a space to shift perceptions

In practice, this took the form of a Finance Innovation Lab, which was built for the client by leveraging EY’s wavespace network. The EY Consulting and Assurance teams worked together on this project to help create the conditions that allowed the client to have these conversations – bringing our own different perspectives to bear on the project.

Challenging assumptions

Over the course of an eight-week program, wavespace hosted dozens of key stakeholders in over 150 meetings, giving them the perspective and collaborative focus they needed to think about and ask questions about the best ways to transforming their finance operations. At the same time, participants were challenged to work identifying meaningful ways to assess how technology solutions could be applied to their finance processes.

First, the client landed on the Cloud as the most appropriate technology for their needs. Within wavespace, they then started challenging their own assumptions – rightly identifying the fact that the Cloud could not be considered just as a technology play but needed to be understood as a wider platform that could transform the finance function in multiple ways.

Overall, compared with their former ways of working, the client realized they could benefit from a 300% increase in data processing capacity, in 25% of the time and with a 30-50% reduction in cost.

With these new Cloud-enabled processes, they identified the potential to remove the need for manual reconciliations between different systems or data sets. This could then potentially save significant man-hours – including reducing the time taken to close accounting books from up to 20 days down to four days – freeing up time and resources for more value-adding tasks.

The client was enthusiastic about the effectiveness of the collaborative environment EY helped create: “In just ten weeks, we went from “how do we improve finance” – and a certain degree of skepticism over technology products – to 20 well-thought through ideas using the Cloud. It’s generated excitement among our people, because they can see how to make finance better, faster and cheaper, and in the process give the business better controls, better data quality, and more insightful reporting.”

Additional EY contributors include George Ioannou – CFO Consulting Technology, Amy Steptoe – CFO Consulting.