Helping Connect Different Dots In Financial Management

Maximizing Long-Term Corporate Growth And Shareholder Value

In my opinion, CFO work-field comprise of three main areas, controllership, forecasting and strategic thinking. In the hierarchy, controllership and accurate forecasting comes first. Once you ensure that a strong framework is in place to take care of these two aspects, the focus must shift to Strategic partnership. CFO has the inherent advantage of having a 360 degree view of the whole organization. He is best suited to analyse and conceptualize any idea with its holistic impact, therefore he not only becomes the sounding board for the CEO/ Board for any key strategic decision, but also can initiate and drive key decisions. His ability to connect the operational metrics to financial output makes him think about the next area which they need to move, how the operations should be changed to create more shareholder value. He should focus on understanding the business value drivers and to develop a more integrated approach to customers, employees and suppliers. In my career, I have worked actively to restructure the
companies and chalk out a long term plan to bring it back to profitability from 2008 recession, which involved taking decisions about areas to be shut down and areas that need to be focused on.

"CFO has the inherent advantage of having 360 degree view of the whole organization"

Financial Transformations

We are using technology on three primary areas in our organization:
a) Better controllership: In our organization, we have taken the decision to move to ERP for accurate results and also to ensure there is better handling on the reporting and forecasting.

b) Cost reduction: Increased automation of the routine jobs and creating space for the value added jobs is always the biggest challenge for any CFO. With the help of ERP implementation, we are focusing on weeding out  a lot of non-value added jobs like reconciliation of financial output with multiple systems which will result into lesser resources. We are one of the early adopters of cloud which not only provided us the flexibility but also helped us in reducing the overall IT costs.

c) Driving operational rigor: We have implemented BI tool and driving the rigor of operational review through introducing balance scorecard with the help of BI tool. It has helped all the function in speaking the same language and ensuring that we all are focusing on the right metrics.