O2C Digital Maturity: How to Steer Your Organization Through the Digital Transformation

[0:00] Andreea Popescu:

When you embark, let’s say on a digital transformation journey, especially one driven by the business. One of the key things is thinking about how do you work together with your IT organization, right? I think here we have a lot of people from the business, we also have people from IT. So there’s this nice mix. But it’s important to set that tone because what we see more and more, and tools like HighRadius are perfect for that are these digital transformations driven by the business. So it empowers a transformation by and for the business. So what we see more and more is this shift of focus and the shift of how finance delivers value from being sort of the gatekeeper of the one source of truth of closing of the bookkeeping, to adding value differently. Obviously that point’s still very important, right? We still need to provide accurate data to our stakeholders. But all the other stuff we’re going to do is get up bring the real value, and that one piece is going to be almost a lights out kind of operation. I’ll show you a video that sort of kicks off that story, and then I’ll take over again.

[1:10] VIDEO:

The world is changing at a rapid rate, business is becoming enabled with new technology leading to faster delivery of goods and services tailored to customer needs at a high quality while lower-cost. In turn, finance needs to pick up the pace driving digital disruption while providing a flexible platform to create value for the business. New worlds will revolve around data, performance, and value with a CFO becoming more of a cheap value officer. To stay relevant, finance will need to define its different stakeholder groups and their requirements more clearly, and explain how it creates long term value for all of them. The finance function will need to ensure systems and processes capture, record, and report these broader assets as well as meaningful performance drivers in the form of relevant non-financial information, all of which will need some form of assurance. The CFO needs to develop that finance function from being a cost intense requirement towards a value creator within the organization. Through constant and closer alignment to the business, finance needs to become a business expert in order to support and drive digital enablement, end to end. Being at the heart of data, for example, from Digital Trends, finance has the ultimate insights and could predict the business and value of tomorrow before the customer knows their demand. Through the use of the latest technology, finance will enable real-time data availability and full customization of information based on one single source of truth. The future CEOs will focus their efforts on five key areas in order to-

[3:01] Andreea Popescu:

So that’s where I’ll take over again.

[3:04] Andreea Popescu:

See? So coming back to this picture, right? So what we’ve seen is true, the way we do business is very different. And the one core piece of value sits in data, I think we’ve heard that throughout the whole conference data is the new gold basically, right? And finance is positioned perfectly to drive that to drive, get creating insights from data, and then creating value from those insights. That’s the core goal. So what we’ll see is that the way we spend as finance professionals, our time on each of these pockets of value is going to change as mentioned before, originally, May, most of the time goes to trust that accounting, that’s going to switch so very important, but we’re going to spend more time on the others. Now, I’ll just point a couple of examples out from each of these we can go into more detail later but time doesn’t permit us to go into too much detail. But if you look at adaptive finance, this is sort of a customizable version of insights. So the reports you deliver today to some of the businesses, some of the local teams, that’s going to be a drag and drop kind of report. So you empower those people to do with the insights that you delivered what they need and to use it in the way they needed to make the decisions. Trusted accounting, as mentioned still there, but it’s going to be more of a lights out, hands-off kind of operation. We have blockchain, we have real-time closing, all of those things are technologies that are already there, we just need to utilize them. Business performance, really the controlling point of view. So this is all about predictive. That’s the keyword here. What we’ll see is that the way we see value in our organizations, the value streams, we’re going to be able to predict that and use that in a much quicker and faster way. CFO programs, that’s all about M&A. Right? Finance is always in the lead when it comes to big integrations. They’re doing the heavy lifting, right? And that’s going to be easier and we’re going to be able to spend more time on doing a smart analysis of the market where we want to go with our business. And then corporate finance. How do we talk with banks? There’s a lot of banks present here at this conference. It’s not going to change from today to tomorrow. But there is a transformation there. Right? Cryptocurrency I think we’ve all heard that, lucky you if you do, but that’s kind of a shift. Does this resonate with you? We can always talk about it more later.

[5:40] Andreea Popescu:

So how do we get to that point, right? There’s still a lot of questions we need to answer. We also still have questions and we try to solve those questions together. So we mapped out a couple here. We’re not going to go into too much detail into all of them. But one thing I want to point out is that there’s some core pockets of questions. There’s people, processes, technology, and organization and then jam, my colleagues are going to go into a little bit more detail on what that means. So maybe zooming into the first one, does digital have an evolutionary or disruptive impact on finance, what’s going to happen with a finance function? So I’ll quickly show you a picture that is going to have a disruptive impact, right. And I don’t want to don’t eat too much. There’s a lot of texts on this, but I want to pull your focus to the number drop. This is the finance roles. I’m not saying this is happening tomorrow. But this is a transition that we see happening. There are new roles that are going to be created. And some roles are going to disappear or be automated, right. And that’s something we’ve already seen happening with the GPS, the shared service center, the GPS. It’s happening, right? This is not a negative thing. This just means we have more time to do those value, adding tasks to do the analytics and all of that.

[7:01] Andreea Popescu:

Maybe what does that mean for how our finance organization is structured? And if we dropped 30? How do we still work together? Right. So these are, let’s say the three core groups that we see in organizations. We have group finance, the GBS, or shared service center if you have some biggest companies do and then local finance, and what each of those areas is doing is also going to shift. So we see that in group finance, we’re moving towards and sort of end to end kind of focus, or we’re not going to focus as much anymore on like an SAP integration, but we’re going to focus you know, the real agile kind of way of adding value.

[7:49] Andreea Popescu:

Hello, we’re back.

[7:52] Andreea Popescu:

Again, the same story, we’re going to have a digital workforce, add a team’s ways of working empowerment of those teams as well. And then goes to feed into local finance. And that’s really where the business partner word, but where that comes in.