siliconindia | | June 202119does not have people who work on automation. They tend to look at vendors as and when needs arise. The big challenge with this is automation in the finance function ends up getting deprioritized. In the organization of tomorrow, the finance organization would be a more agile unit moving in sync with the business. To enable this, my view is that eventually the finance function would possibly have three layers and then there would be the CFO who would be using the output of the layers to ensure proper decision makingAt the bottom layer you would have smart finance factories. These factories would be common across the company reducing the amount of duplication. These factories would be lean and automation would be a major part of these centers. By and large there would be a specific IT team which would continuously work towards automating processes and reports in a structured manner. This layer would mostly be offshore driving cost efficiencies. The next layers would be having specialist centers of excellence that would be using the output of the factories to perform specific tasks needed for the business. These would be teams with deep functional capabilities performing functions such as revenue analytics, balance sheet management and reporting. Along with these tasks, most common functions such as treasury, regulatory reporting and tax would reside in these centers of excellence and they would work to ensure regulatory requirements are met. The third layer would be specific business specialists. These would be people who would work closely with the business units and would be the point of contact between those units and the finance function. One can think of them as controllers for their units. Any customer interaction for their units on the finance side would also be handled by them. This layer would interact with the centers of the excellence and ensure that the requirements of the business would be met. One of the major functions of this layer would be to build scenarios allowing the business to see the financial impact of different business situations.At the highest level the CFO would be responsible for holding the entire structure together and driving the unit in the same strategic division as the overall business. The CFO would need to keep tweaking the structure to ensure that the needs of the business are metDIGITIZATION OF THE FINANCE FUNCTION One of major drivers which would help transformation of the finance function would be the use of technology. Three key technologies which would be important for the digitization of the finance function are listed below.1. Automation and Robotization ­ Processes which are repetitive can be automated and in many cases the work can actually be done by bots who perform the functions ensuring work is done quickly and without errors 2. Data visualization ­ Various tools allow data to be represented graphically allowing business to make proper decisions. These charts would be updated on a real time basis3. Advanced Analytics ­ In today's organization, there is no shortage of data. This data however is useless unless the organization is able to use the data to gain a competitive advantage. For that advanced level of analysis would need to be done on the data. The big advantage is that computing power is cheap and readily available allowing organizations to perform analytics which were unthinkable 2- 3 years ago.CHALLENGES While most organizations understand that digitization is essential, there are several challenges which organization would have to overcome. Some of these are listed below 1. Lack of talent specially in skills such as automation / advanced analytics 2. Lack of IT infrastructure3. Upfront costs of transformation4. Change in mindset of employees who are happy with existing processes Ultimately as the world around us continues to change it is essential for the finance function to evolve. While there are challenges which organizations face it is essential that organizations understand that transformation of the finance function is directly linked to their survival. In the organization of tomorrow, the finance organization would be a more agile unit moving in sync with the business
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