Last week, I presented on stage at the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference in London, joined by Bruno Vaffier, COO at Cegid and former CFO at Webhelp.
Since the attendance and response to the session was so positive, I wanted to share some of the key points covered in our session: Finance Transformation - The CFO’s Playbook to Value Creation.
The evolution of finance
Historically, finance held the responsibility of providing compliant, accurate financial information including audited financials and tax filings. And a core part of finance’s responsibilities was to impose structure and control on the business. That was the justification for massive ERP projects - business structure was formed around finance’s chart of accounts with the goal of driving management discipline. However the impact of these projects on business performance is debatable, since what actually drives performance is business strategy, top line growth, and operational efficiency.
Today, finance still provides structure and discipline. But increasingly, finance needs to be a trusted advisor to the business. To deliver the right data and analysis to support management decisions, and to drive accountability by focusing on areas of over and under-performance. It’s a much more challenging (and rewarding role) for finance. Finance needs to maintain rigor and accuracy while adapting to the business, not having the business adapt to finance.
Expert advice for finance transformations
Finance has to keep up with the business as it evolves, but has to do so with constrained resources because it’s still a cost center. That’s why finance transformations are so critical. During our session, Bruno shared his experience on successful transformations.
Team buy-in and change management
Bruno highlighted Webhelp’s implementation of Pigment as an example of a successful transformation project. Key to the success was buy-in from all teams, which eased change management and drove adoption.
Role of data
At Webhelp, the finance team gained significant value from centralizing project data. They synthesized information from various ERP systems into a central repository and used Pigment as their shared platform for planning and reporting. This eliminated the importing and exporting of data into Excel, and data sent by email. The approach made it faster and more efficient to integrate acquisitions.
Incorporating AI
Bruno believes we are the start of the AI journey, with sophisticated use cases still to be developed. However there are a few things prudent CFO’s can do right now to ensure success down the line. The first is making data a top priority. The models of tomorrow will be trained on the data you’re collecting today, so ensuring consistency and avoiding Excel will pay dividends further down the line.
Technology choices
Bruno’s advice in choosing the right technology vendors is to test the product in real time. Don’t rely on pitches or demos, ask for interactive proof-of-concepts where the vendors are asked to make changes in the meeting. This was a key criteria for Bruno choosing Pigment for business planning, as we were the only vendor able to incorporate changes in real-time.
Next steps
To read more about Webhelp and Pigment, click here.
