Карта сайта
Версия для печати

Важность стратегической функции финансовых отделов

7 июня 2012 Команды финансовых отделов - крайне важная составляющая любой компании, ответственная за эффективность и выполнение поставленных задач. В их обязанности входит предоставление актуальной информациb о прошлом и настоящем, интерпретации всех финансовых показателей с целью принятия правильных решений руководством. Это и является самой главной стратегической миссией финансовых отделов – предоставление и анализ важной бизнес-информации. Однако сегодня из-за стремительно растущего количества данных, ускорения бизнес-процессов и кастомизации информационных запросов, самый главный аналитический актив компании – финансовый отдел – полностью погружен в ежедневную рутину составления отчетов, абсолютно не заботясь о будущем компании. К чему это может привести и как с этим бороться, читайте в материале эксперта компании IBM Тима О’Брайана. (Материал опубликован на английском языке)
Finance teams are the performance management captain of the corporate ship empowered to provide the executive team, and business and support units with real insight and understanding of past, present, and future performance while guiding them on what the information means to each of their constituents and how it can be interpreted for decision making.  That is their most strategic value to the business. However, because of the explosion of information, speed of business, growing systems through M&A and unique information capture needs of different areas of the business not to mention growing business practice demands, such as regulatory compliance to meet the regional, national, and global reporting requirements, the corporation’s most important analytical asset, finance departments, remains mired in just completing the basic week-to-week tasks without providing this strategic guidance.  As a result, emerging trends, exploitable opportunities, efficiency gains, addition-by-subtraction divestitures, and M&A opportunities go undiscovered because the analytical part of finance is asleep at the wheel.  It has its proverbial head down doing the day-to-day grind of low-value activities where this analytical blind spot can eventually drive the company out of business.

Let me illustrate.

In the 1960′s, IBM was the 800-pound gorilla in the mainframe business whose technology supremacy went unchallenged and superior performance went virtually unabated into the 1970′s.  They were the blue suits bearing information-based mainframes to help companies use data to run their large – sometimes multinational – businesses with greater know-how about customers, products, operations, and financial performance far more adeptly than any other technology could.  Yes, they were considered the masters of product innovation largely due to world-class business practices and industry expertise.  However, Big Blue got complacent and far too comfortable in their long held pole position.  Their inflated confidence and market share eventually disintegrated as they missed the advent of the new information-based technology, which, if they would have had the right analytic capabilities in place, they would have seen it coming; the emergence of the minicomputer.  Minicomputers were technologically simpler than mainframes but with stronger computing power while requiring less resources to run them.  To be fair, it wasn’t just IBM that missed the advent of minicomputers.  It was virtually every mainframe company in existence at that time.  This new technology virtually wiped out the entire mainframe business such that no mainframe business would be a major player in the minicomputer business at all.

What happened?  What was missed?  Who screwed up?

In my opinion, there were many failures that caused this emerging technology to go unaddressed by IBM and others, but the chief culprit who could and should have been prepared for it was finance.  Yes, I think it’s up to finance as the owners of business performance (past, present, and future) to fundamentally understand the business climate – internally and externally – to then advise their corporate constituents on what the information they’ve analyzed means to them.  For this to happen finance needs to get a handle on its core responsibilities before it can begin to really spot these performance-sapping icebergs that can possibly turn into business shuttering threats.

Let’s get back to the technology story for a minute if that’s okay.  Then, I’ll finish my point.

Where were we?  IBM’s out because the mainframe business has gone south – way south by way of the minicomputer.  Exit IBM.  Enter Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC virtually created the minicomputer business along with a few other aggressively managed companies like Data General, Prime, Wang Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and Nixdorf.  Did DEC and others in the minicomputer business learn any lessons from IBM’s big miss on the minicomputer market so as to not repeat the same mistake?  Of course not.  The story of DEC’s demise rings almost too tellingly true to IBM’s mainframe debacle of the 1970′s.  In fact, the management gurus and business journals missed it too.  Digital Equipment Corporation was considered by all who had some insight into the company’s operations as being the ultimate technology company for decades to come.  For certain it was a featured company in the McKinsey Study that became the stellar 1980′s management book, In Search of Excellence.  DEC seemed destined for monster success.  Still, despite all this fanfare, DEC missed the next wave in computing technology, the desktop computer market.

Again, where was finance watching past performance by measuring and monitoring it, to get analytical insight into what the future might look like to then advise their constituents across the business on what all of this means to each one of them?  Answer: Heads down.

The desktop computing market was predictably seized not by DEC or one of its minicomputer compadres but by Apple Computer, Tandy, Commodore, and IBM’s PC-division. (Yes, IBM can’t be held down for long!)

What happened next?  Like Rick Blaine says in the movie Casablanca, “Play It Again, Sam.”  Apple, Tandy, IBM and the rest of the desktop computer gang focused on making the best desktop computers they could but ended up missing the next new, new thing.  Apple Computer and IBM lagged 5 years behind bringing the latest-and-greatest technology rage to the market: portable computers.  That market was owned by Silicon Graphics, Sun, and Apollo – all newcomers to this market.

In each case, the leading companies mentioned were regarded as the gold standard given their product excellence and operational execution only to be quickly pushed aside by an out-of-nowhere, technologically superior solution that reset the market’s expectations rendering the prior leader’s solution frumpy and stale.  Missing emerging trends in the marketplace and not adapting to them quickly enough can ring a death knell for most companies.  Think Wang, Silicon Graphics, Apollo.  For others, this misstep can set them back 5 or even 10 years before they’re back on their feet again.

As a note, in the above example, I simply chose the technology sector  but we could have easily used the retail merchandising sector (Think Sears vs. Nordstrom) or retail books (Think Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon), or Automotive (Think GM vs. Toyota). Each situation is an example of a failure to see the changing landscape which, I believe, finance is mostly at fault for squandering these opportunities.

How come finance?  I think finance failed their companies in each instance because they weren’t effective enough in managing the day-to-day, low value tasks which, if they had them under control, they would have greater leverage to spend time on higher-value practices like forecasting and business analytics to uncover data points that can help the entire business spot emerging market forces before it’s too late to respond.  This responsibility to identify these threats and opportunities lies squarely on finance.  If not them, then who else?  Be careful because whomever you’ll name will probably expect finance to provide them with the meaningful insight into performance results across the business as well as external information, which, again, means it’s incumbent on finance.

So, how does finance get to that point where it’s able to provide this kind of insight with the resources it has because Lord knows it’s not going to get additional headcount?  Well, it all starts with finding a way to better leverage the resources it has.  This requires finance teams to get the lower value tasks automated as much as they can so that they can off-load these process management steps to take on added capacity for these analytic practices.
What are the world class finance teams doing to be analytic leaders in their industry?  World class analytic finance teams have these repeatable practices down to great consistency and repeatability from end-to-end:
  • Process: Financial close, financial consolidation, and financial reporting processes;
  • Solution: Financial Management & Control technology, such as IBM Cognos Controller.
  • Process: Disclosure management-related efforts, including all external reporting, such as regulatory compliance reporting;
  • Solution: Identify these processes and automate the end-to-end needs through a disclosure management technology solution, such as IBM Cognos FSR;
  • Process: Financial, strategic, and operational budgeting and forecasting, including Profitability modeling and real-time analytical capabilities;
  • Solution: Leverage an enterprise-class budgeting, forecasting and profitability modeling solution with real-time calculation capabilities for high volume data sets, such as IBM Cognos TM1;
These practices are the foundational elements required for finance to be the advisor in providing guidance to the business.  Excel at the practices mentioned above and you’re soon positioning your analytic experts on your finance team to do the real analysis they’re supposed to be doing.  It’s incumbent upon the CFO’s finance department to provide this guidance and leadership given finance’s role as the performance managers for the company.  It is therefore finance’s job to provide insights into past, present, and future performance but also trends, anomalies and market opportunities that become visible only after thorough analysis of the information-based business results gleaned from systems, i.e. ERP, CRM, SCM, etc. and processes, i.e. forecasting, what-if scenario analytics, etc.

This finance role is looked to not only explain past business performance and its financial effects but also advise and guide the strategy in determining where to make investments with the resources at hand.  The CFO’s analytics team – finance – needs to spend its time not on the everyday execution of basic, low value process steps, like compiling, validating, and reconciling data for various internal and external reporting needs but also analyzing past, present, and future to present guidance on what’s happened, what’s happening now, and what could happen.  Only with an infrastructure in place to easily manage these basic elements of the finance team’s mandate can the real value-added analytic insights come to light.  Otherwise, their companies will continue to drive through its business climate with a perpetual blind spot on what’s coming soon rendering them the next Tandy Computer, Silicon Graphics, or Apollo.

It’s up to you finance to not let this happen.

Source: ibm-business-analytics.com

Дополнительно

Cognos ControllerПодробное описание решения
Cognos Financial Statement ReportingПодробное описание решения
Cognos TM1Подробное описание решения