Minimizing Disruption And Duplication Of Effort
In today’s time, CFOs are under greater pressure, scrutiny and accountability at companies-
large and small. The demands of both internal and external stakeholders— including
CEOs and boards, investors, regulators, customers, business managers and functional managers— continue to expand and seemingly everyone expects more from companies and their finance function. Amid these high expectations, CFO serves as strategic business counselor, steward of performance and decision-support information, cost controller and trusted adviser to the CEO.
The need to maintain careful focus on cost control while at the same time enabling growth, will be a delicate balancing act over the next few years. It will be important to recognize that the
issues are closely intertwined. CFOs are uniquely qualified to assess which opportunities for growth come with the potential for acceptable margins. Our role is to “green-light” the best of
these opportunities while applying the brakes to the more costly projects, and continuing to seek out new efficiencies across the enterprise.
The CFOs’ broadening influence–which in many companies now encompasses IT, procurement and operations, as well as finance and strategy–also makes them well positioned to become the catalyst for change in their organization.
Many industries are realizing that the ways in which they made money in the past are unlikely to be appropriate in the future. Moreover, the pace of change is now so rapid that companies
must constantly be rethinking their operating and business models and adapting them to suit an evolving including external environment. For instance, INR depreciation over past couple of
months has disrupted the entire business model for companies dependent upon import content; what made economic sense just six months ago is no more valid – forcing companies to drive localization project at full throttle and pursue growth that provides natural hedge. This means accepting largescale change as a normal part of doing business, rather than the
exception - Constant reorganization shall become our tool to deal with the rapid pace of change.
"The need to maintain careful focus on cost control while at the same time enabling
growth, will be a delicate balancing act over the next few years"
From the perspective of the CFO, this change needs to take place in a way that minimizes disruption and duplication of effort and maximizes efficiency. It’s easy to consume too many resources on making incremental changes, when in fact what is needed is deeper business
transformation. The biggest barrier to change is that people only want to focus on legacy activities. As CFOs, we need to convince them to let go of activities that are not useful and focus on new ones instead.
CFOs are making strategic investments in IT solutions that automate and standardize critical processes not within their own department but across the organization. These investments
not only help decrease costs and cycle times, but pay additional dividends in the form of strengthened compliance and improved financial returns. From closing the books to straight-through payment processing, such IT solutions are helping companies ensure lean, compliant financial operations; improve strategy execution; and enable financial transformation by providing a proven, unified platform for business agilityvisibility, and informed decisions.
