How can you make your finance function as agile as your business strategy?

How can finance deliver against unprecedented pressures and sustain disruption at speed, with quality, and within budget?

In brief

• Organizations are transforming at record pace, creating pressures on Finance to modernize, reduce costs, support new business initiatives, and more
• EY’s Finance Factory, an innovative workforce solution and operating model, offers organizations the ability to withstand continuous disruption by increasing agility while simultaneously reducing costs

Need to match supply with demand at speed, at a predictable cost, and at efficient scale

While the pressures on finance may be unprecedented, they are not expected to slow in the foreseeable future. Rather, a new normal of constant, vacillating demands is forcing finance leaders to explore more sustainable operating models that offer agility, scalability and cost predictability.

Effectively managing and prioritizing these diverse sources of demand has proven untenable for many firms. As demand volumes and priorities vary significantly across business, finance and technology teams, organizations struggle to curate a sustainable framework that can dynamically identify and govern these cross-functional demands, reconcile between them, and maintain alignment to strategic objectives. For example, business teams generate demand by expanding into new products and geographies; finance teams operating in their fiduciary role as stewards of data integrity and transparency are identifying enterprise data quality issues through regulatory and internal financial performance reporting; and technology is increasingly pressured to upgrade, replace and/or re-platform systems to expand capabilities while reducing costs. These demands often fight for the same precious resources. How do you prioritize? How do you work effectively with front-office and other nonfinance constituencies?

On the supply side, sourcing and retaining capability-specific talent is complicated when trying to align with rapidly changing demand. Internal staff centric resourcing models come with greater risk for excess capacity following peak demand, limited fungibility of skill sets, static location and shift coverage, and the high costs and laborious processes associated with recruitment, turnover, training and retraining. On the other hand, while they do provide a more scalable and capability targeted supply, project-centric resourcing models that rely on consultants for specific bodies of work come with a premium of high, unpredictable costs (including the expensive request-for-proposal process), and brain drain occurs when consultants move on to other clients at the completion of projects.

Our clients have found that key success factors in effectively balancing this equation is an ability to streamline demand, align scalable supply of delivery capabilities to projected horizons for demand, and enable predictable costs for outcomes. As they consider new operating models, organizations are re-evaluating the balance between in-house staffing vs. third-party sourcing and capitalizing on the acceleration of remote productivity to further optimize location strategy.