Building a Best-run Finance Organization: A New Role to Address Today’s Business Realities

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There is a company executive with a growing influence in today’s boardroom – the chief financial officer. And the role of the finance organizations that these executives lead is expanding as well.
While the advent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has focused enormous attention on the financial accountability and internal controls of companies across all industries, company executives recognize that individual business activities do not occur in a vacuum. All functions – such as sales, marketing, manufacturing, service, and even human resources – affect not only the bottom line but also a company’s financial integrity. Increasingly, prudent companies are drawing their finance organizations into greater collaboration with the operational aspects of the enterprise. Moreover, companies are asking their financial officers to take on a more prominent role in defining company strategy.
This SAP Executive Insight examines the changing role of the finance organization in today’s business environment. Further, by answering the following questions, it describes how companies can develop best-run finance organizations:

• What operating characteristics help companies develop best-run finance organizations?
• How do you measure a best-run finance organization?
• How does the focus of an organization change as bestrun finance methods are applied?

Executive Agenda At a Glance...

 

Recognizing Best-Run Finance

Leading companies that are successful in incorporating finance as a core line of business typically display some common characteristics. These companies are:

• Agile. As the economic environment continues to change at an everincreasing pace, there is no time to implement change in small, bite-size chunks. Centralizing processes – such as shared financial services, risk analysis, and compliance – can provide consistency that enables a company to implement changes once, quickly reaching the entire enterprise.
• Connected. No executive – or business function – is an island. Finance, especially, has dependencies on activities in each line of business across the entire organization. The integration of a company’s operations with its financial function is a key success factor, fostering a common view of the current state and future direction of an organization.
• Metric driven. Leading companies measure their successes – such as the effectiveness of their transactional processes, the performance of core business operations, and the efficiency that finance contributes to the overall organization. Particularly for an evolving business, metrics can also provide a clearer picture of a company’s starting point, its transformation plan, and the results of its execution.

Investing in Financial Processes

Supporting these success factors are a company’s internal processes. Topperforming companies have financial processes that are:

• Automated. When a transactional process is automated, the result is fewer errors and less effort. With process reliability, financial professionals can shift their focus from repetitive and manual transactional tasks to more strategic business analysis.
• Integrated. Financial processes should be plugged into business processes across the enterprise. Organizations need to pull down the silos and ensure that all relevant financial and operational functions are considered when making critical business decisions.
• Consolidated. It is inefficient to implement process or regulatory changes that affect an entire organization on a system-by-system or subdivision basis. A common technical platform can eliminate this potentially costly requirement.

Striking a Balance

The best-run finance organization will continue to address near-term priorities while helping to chart long-term business direction. As a result, the mission of today’s finance organization is truly both tactical and strategic:

• Tactical. Standard financial operations, such as month-end close, remain critical to a company’s success. Processing financial transactions efficiently and in strict legal compliance solidifies a company’s standing in the financial, analyst, and shareholder communities.
• Strategic. At a time when business models are changing rapidly, finance plays an increasingly important role in charting the course of an evolving company. Finance must drive strategy and innovation – enabling the growth of an organization, facilitating the changes that come with that growth, and managing risk.

SAP and the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) have conducted benchmarking studies that provide important insight in how leading companies achieve the desired balance in their financial organizations. Further, by analyzing the performance of businesses across diverse industries, these studies also offer CFOs the metrics needed to assess their own company’s success.

Agile Optimizing Finance to Maximize Efficiency

Like best-run operations everywhere, more and more finance organizations are looking for ways to streamline their processes. Automation is an obvious strategy. By automating transactional processes, top finance performers are lowering the cost of financial activities, reducing errors, and increasing turnaround speeds. In fact, benchmarking studies reveal that top quartile performers have finance costs that average just 0.7% of company revenue, compared to greater than 1.3% for the bottom quartile. Automated processes can also ensure that an organization’s core data is reliable and readily available.
But without a systematic method to ensure compliance with these processes, companies can still experience costly localizations across business units and geographies. A growing trend in best-run finance is to drive efficiency through shared services. A finance organization with a single business process platform can provide consistency across different regions and divisions – and still address the requirements of local regulations. The advantages of this approach include the sharing of financial resources, quicker and more accurate financial consolidation, and increased speed in complying with legal and regulatory changes. Benchmarking again shows that companies with mature shared-services organizations achieve cost savings and increase organizational effectiveness (see Figure 1).
Responding Efficiently to Risk and Compliance Issues In addition to controlling financial exposure, companies are expected to maintain consistent operational and audit processes. To ensure compliance with legal regulations, companies must implement checks and controls – based on the context of individual business processes – that define who can access and change information. ASUG/SAP studies indicate that targeted governance, risk, and compliance initiatives can help companies measurably improve their ability to detect and prevent fraud while reducing the resources spent on compliance. Further, as financial and operational rules change, new processes must be implemented throughout an organization as soon as new rules take effect. A centralized model to control risk and compliance facilitates the ability of an organization to turn on a dime in a changing global economy.

GRUMA

Industry: Consumer products – food
Summary
GRUMA is the worldwide leading producer of corn flour and tortillas and sells its products in over 50 countries. GRUMA required a process and tool to ensure that its end users had the right access privileges to perform day-to-day business operations without exposing the business to risk. GRUMA selected the SAP® GRC Access Control application and established a compliance program with minimal investment that enables exceptional change and access control.
Results with SAP® Software

• Internal IT audit revision time completed 90% faster
• E xternal IT audit revision time completed 50% faster
• Greater ability to track compliance with auditors’ recommendations and measure improvements
• Faster, risk-free user setup
• I mproved risk assessment

Connected Integrating Finance to Ensure Effectiveness

Embedding Finance in Closed Loop Processes

Finance is no longer a back-office function. Instead, today’s best-run finance organizations reinvest the time and resources saved by running an efficient organization to provide proactive insights that enable other lines of business to make informed decisions supporting the best interests of the entire company. Holistic processes that encompass every part of the business – and that facilitate communication between departments – are critical to ensuring that finance is integrated with these operational decisions.
Finance, marketing, sales, and manufacturing must all work together, for example, to effectively determine appropriate spend based on expected returns and, ultimately, the bottom line. With closedloop processes in place, a finance department can forecast potential revenue, run what-if analyses, and develop contingency plans to manage costs. If marketing targets more sales than manufacturing can supply, managers can adjust demand plans or secure additional manufacturing resources. If manufacturing costs increase, finance can flag offtarget trends and initiate early corrective action.

Enabling Integrated Information

In addition, a company cannot effectively pursue a strategic direction unless there is consistent, accurate, and real-time visibility across the enterprise – especially when it comes to its financial information. A business, for instance, cannot react proactively to demand forecast adjustments if this information takes several days to reach the finance department. And in highly siloed environments, there is the risk that critical information will never reach other impacted organizations such as manufacturing.
Finance needs information that is timely and accurate if it is to fully assess the operational situation of a company. Manual processes open the door to error when transferring data or rekeying entries. Automation can ensure a free flow of accurate information between departments, lines of business, and geographies – optimizing the entire business.

Acting as Strategic Advisor

A truly connected finance organization will identify opportunities that take its company to the next level. With its ability to analyze operational performance across organizations, a finance organization is in the unique position to identify current trends, forecast future results, and ensure consistency across these organizational boundaries.
Studies indicate that as finance organizations evolve, a greater percentage of their time is spent on business analysis (see Figure 2). Accompanying this shift are increases in operating margins as much as 38%. Top performers increase efficiency with lower transactional costs, while maximizing effectiveness with greater emphasis on strategic decision support.

Volvo Aero Services

Industry:Wholesale distribution
Summary
Based in Boca Raton, Florida, Volvo Aero Services Corp. is a leading provider of aftermarket parts and services for the aviation industry. In addition to being the exclusive distributor of surplus parts for Boeing Company, Volvo Aero Services offers a range of services including warehousing, financing, repair management, and leasing of aircraft parts and engines. Part of the larger Volvo Group of companies, the company chose SAP® software to enable an evolving business model and to achieve operating efficiencies.
Results with SAP® Software

• Days sales outstanding reduced 15%
• O n-time deliveries increased 18% (up to 97%)
• T ime for general ledger reconciliation reduced 50%
• I ncreased visibility into product costs and market demand

Metric Driven Putting the Right Measurements in Place

Maintaining Financial Excellence

The measurements that an organization puts in place – and how these performance indicators are prioritized – often determine which companies are business leaders. Metrics that measure the efficiency of finance operations typically include cost per transaction, fixed asset valuation, department headcount, and audit times (see Figure 3). Such measurements, however, must be evaluated in concert. For example, both cost and speed are critical in time-to-close processes. Rapid financial results enable effective and timely business decisions for all business units of a company.
Financial organizations will continue to process the important daily transactions that invoice customers, pay vendors, and capture operational costs. Indeed, an ongoing mandate of finance is to generate the financial statements expected by the market and shareholders.

Driving Operational Excellence

Beyond the necessary financial statements, the best-run finance organizations also play an integral part in operations planning. By performing operational analysis, finance can support the decisions of departments across the enterprise: sales, manufacturing, and services. In fact, it is often the finance department that brings company-wide forecasts together in a single comprehensive plan – providing what-if analysis, assessing risk, and identifying inconsistencies among departments.
Best-run finance goes one step further and compares company performance with external economic data. This comparison can reveal how the business stacks up to the general market, its industry, and its geography. By providing such insight, a finance organization can drive growth strategies. At the same time, these strategies can mitigate the risks presented by business realities such as economic downturns and emerging global regulations.

Slade Gorton

Industry:Wholesale distribution
Summary
Slade Gorton & Co. Inc. is the industry leader in the development, marketing, and direct distribution of seafood. Since 1928, the company has worked hard to provide its customers with the finest and widest line of fresh and frozen seafood available. By offering only the highest-quality seafood products from around the world, Slade Gorton is transforming the way foodservice and retail customers and consumers perceive and buy seafood.
Results with SAP® Software

• Ability to operate with very lean staff and minimal costs, while maintaining very high levels of customer service
• T hirty-eight FTEs in finance department per billion dollars in revenue (average benchmark is 100)*
• Finance costs at 0.35% of revenue (average benchmark is 1.2%)*
• Real-time, accurate, timely reports with lower IT support costs

The Road Ahead Becoming a Best-Run Finance Organization

There is little doubt that today’s CFOs are changing the focus of their organizations and, as a result, influence business operations far beyond the traditional boundaries of finance.
SAP industry experts and the value engineering (VE) team can help your company build a best-run finance organization. These experts provide support throughout the value life cycle, from developing business cases to sharing knowledge on how to maximize the value of SAP® software such as the following:

• SAP ERP Financials solution: A comprehensive financial management solution engineered to support companies from the midmarket to the most complex, multinational corporations, across a broad range of industries, which supports global financial reporting standards, multiple currencies and languages with over 45 country- specific versions, and tight integration with operational processes
• Financial performance management: Solutions for enterprise performance management that help companies capitalize on the value of their corporate data, enabling organizations to become more agile and competitive by providing organizational alignment, visibility, and greater confidence, based on information coming from many different parts of the business – including financials and operations, external partners, vendors, and customers
• Governance, risk, and compliance: Solutions that promote corporate accountability by unifying corporate strategy, control initiatives, opportunity discovery, and loss mitigation across the extended enterprise The VE team consists of more than 175 professionals providing in-depth industry and business process expertise in strategy, IT planning, global deployments, and benchmarking. For more information, contact value.engineering@sap.com.

The ASUG/SAP Benchmarking and best practices program can help organizations assess strengths, identify potential areas for improvement, and recognize best practices and IT strategies that enable companies to excel. Benchmarking and best practice reports are available for financials; shared services; and governance, risk, and compliance. Additional reports address other operational areas, such as human capital management; supply chain and manufacturing; and business intelligence. For more information about the ASUG/SAP Benchmarking program, visit www.asug.com/Benchmarking or contact benchmarking@asug.com.

About the Author

Birgit Starmanns is a senior director in the Customer Value Network group within SAP value engineering. Starmanns concentrates on developing solution-focused communities and networks, creating value-oriented thought leadership, and working with strategic customers – principally in the area of financials and customer relationship management (CRM).
Previously, Starmanns was a vice president in SAP’s CRM product management organization for partner channel management and a director for e-commerce. Prior to joining SAP, she was a manager in management consulting organizations, with a focus on financial and management accounting. Starmanns holds an MBA and a BA from the College of William and Mary.