Insightful CFO Support with Data Analytics
With federal budgets increasingly constrained, CFOs and their teams must perform operational planning with a fraction of the staffing, limited access to modernized systems, inflexible decision-making processes and old data that magnifies the challenges of poor decision quality. Data analytics and automation can empower these finance leaders to better manage the complexities of the operational planning process.
The ability to provide a single version of the truth enables a CFO to take more control over strategic business decisions, while empowering departments and employees to make a greater impact on the day-to-day, or even minute-to-minute, operational business decisions that are outside of the traditional purview of the finance function. This requires advanced capabilities like predictive analytics, cost modeling and data integration that can provide a more holistic financial picture of the enterprise.
As the economy continues to shift, CFOs must re-plan and adjust the balances of enterprise resources in real time in response to significant economic disruptions. To do so, they must have authoritative, timely views of both internal and external forces at play. These insights are crucial to the CFO’s role in fostering business agility and enabling financial leadership to help steer the company through changing market conditions.
To fulfill their roles, Insightful CFO Support with Data Analytics must be able to translate the board’s and CEO’s strategic corporate message into a narrative that resonates with all stakeholders. This involves identifying what’s at stake for each audience and curating supporting data, analytics and insights to illustrate and animate that narrative. For example, when communicating about a strategy to manage costs through price increases, the CFO must identify and communicate what’s at risk for shareholders, while also demonstrating that managing cost pressures is in the best interests of customers and the workforce.
Likewise, other longstanding internal customers of the finance department—human resource, sales and supply chain, for instance—are hungry for more precision and timely insights from CFOs. They want on-demand, drill-down reporting, for example, to see sales by region and customer segment in real time. They are also looking to glean more sophisticated views of the marketplace, such as hedging strategies that protect against fluctuations in market volatility.
As such, the ability to integrate disparate data sets and provide rapid and accurate forecasts is a must for today’s CFO. This is where technology can really make a difference, says Genpact CFO Ed Fitzpatrick. But he stresses that while technology can process data faster, it cannot interpret it, which is why CFOs need to be empowered with the right tools. Those tools are advanced analytics and automation solutions that combine domain expertise with digital technologies to deliver data-led insights at speed. This is the promise of a new generation of financial management platforms, such as EXL’s Digital Finance Suite. To learn more about how EXL’s Digital Finance Suite delivers these tools, download the full report here.