Financial Excellence with Game Changers, presented by SAP: Recent Episodes
Bonnie D. Graham
Game-changing technologies are transformational, exciting, and can move you in amazing new directions. They get you thinking about new ways to scale, compete and grow profitably – driving efficiency for existing finance operations, but also driving insight and transformational change for the entire business. They shake up your status quo. Take your Coffee Break with Game-Changers for our special series on achieving FINANCIAL EXCELLENCE for your company. Learn how you can operate profitably and adapt continuously, to become the savvy innovator and visionary who takes your company across the finish line as you look ahead to the next breakthrough strategy. Financial Excellence with Game Changers, Presented by SAP, on The Business Channel.
Ah, taxes! A bit of “humor” on a definitely serious topic for every enterprise: Benjamin Franklin: “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Bonnie Raitt: “Solar power is the last energy resource that isn't owned yet – nobody taxes the sun yet.”* Arthur C. Clarke: “The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.”Ok, time to get serious. The EY 2020 Tax and Finance Operate survey reported that 51% of all respondents expected an increase to their organization’s tax risk profile from complying with emerging digital tax filing requirements, while a whopping 84% expected it to increase the workload of the tax and finance function.EY’s 2022 Tax and Finance Operations Survey found 84% of respondents are actively transforming to tackle challenges. Talent, legislative and regulatory changes, and future-proofing technology are key concerns for Tax and Finance functions. And the COVID-19 pandemic worsened some challenges, accelerating the need to transform. Reality check: With new regulatory announcements coming every month, your business needs to adapt your processes to remain sustainable and profitable. How do intelligent businesses like yours take your tax transformation as a strategic turning point for operational efficiency and seamless compliance? Stop deprioritizing – or worse, ignoring – your company’s tax function in digital business transformation initiatives. We’ll ask Erika Buson, Sveinung Baumann-Larsen and Vicky Bradford for their insights on The Digital Enterprise: Turning Taxes Into Opportunity!
The Buzz 1: “As specialized tools and technology have emerged, the role of CFO has evolved. CFOs of companies large and small need to embrace flexibility, develop global strategies, and shift their focus to look forward rather than back.” (www.teampay.co/insights/cfo-quotes/) The Buzz 2: “When you are a successful company, you have to fight really hard to make sure you avoid complacency, arrogance, bureaucracy.” (Marianne Lake, CFO of JPMorgan Chase) The Buzz 3: “The CFO needs to be supported by a strategic FP&A team that is excellent at all levels… a team that is prepared for where the company is going—not where it’s been.” (Jim Johnson, Former CFO of Adaptive Insights) Amid globally turbulent times, today’s Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) function is striving to spend less of its time “Planning” and more time delivering value-added “Analysis” to its business constituents. How? Finance and its IT support teams need to focus on the future, utilizing the available modern tools – Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Analytics and Collaboration. Similar to the automotive industry working to deliver safe, self-driving vehicles, FP&A needs to “feel the need, the need for speed” [quoting Lt. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in the Top Gun films] to drive automated or, even better, autonomous planning. What steps can your FP&A team take to harness technology today in order to optimize their time delivering the best possible analysis to your organization tomorrow?We’ll ask Finance professionals Paul Davis at Analysis Prime, Colin Chu at SAP and Nilly Essaides at NeuGroup for their take on Driving The Emphasis on Analysis for Finance: Focus on Automation.
The Buzz 1: Most of the countries negotiating a global overhaul of cross-border taxation of multinationals have backed plans for new rules on where companies are taxed and a tax rate of at least 15%… A global minimum corporate income tax of at least 15% could yield around $150 billion in additional global tax revenues annually. 130 countries, representing more than 90% of global GDP, had backed the agreement at the talks. New rules on where the biggest multinationals are taxed would shift taxing rights on more than $100 billion of profits to countries where the profits are earned. [reuters.com – 2021-07-01]The Buzz 2: As of 4 November 2021, over 135 countries and jurisdictions joined a new two-pillar plan to reform international taxation rules and ensure that multinational enterprises pay a fair share of tax wherever they operate. [oecd.org]Look up! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s global minimum tax. Will your company be hit and if yes, how hard?Global minimum tax rules, aka “Pillar Two Model Rules”, are set to go into effect in 2024. Developed as part of the OECD/G20 BEPS 2.0 project, these rules will dramatically change the international tax landscape and create significant new tax reporting and compliance requirements for affected organizations, in every industry. With the clock ticking, your Finance organization needs to understand the potential impacts of these rules and develop a comprehensive technology-centered plan. Priorities to cover: adapting internal processes and systems to manage the new computations and data requirements, calculating your global minimum tax liabilities and satisfying reporting obligations. Saddle up!We’ll ask Sveinung Baumann-Larsen at EY, Erika Buson at SAP and Matthias Klein at BASF for their take on The Arrival of Minimum Taxes: A New World Order.
The Buzz 1: Most of the countries negotiating a global overhaul of cross-border taxation of multinationals have backed plans for new rules on where companies are taxed and a tax rate of at least 15%… A global minimum corporate income tax of at least 15% could yield around $150 billion in additional global tax revenues annually. 130 countries, representing more than 90% of global GDP, had backed the agreement at the talks. New rules on where the biggest multinationals are taxed would shift taxing rights on more than $100 billion of profits to countries where the profits are earned. [reuters.com – 2021-07-01]
The Buzz 2: As of 4 November 2021, over 135 countries and jurisdictions joined a new two-pillar plan to reform international taxation rules and ensure that multinational enterprises pay a fair share of tax wherever they operate. [oecd.org]
Look up! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s global minimum tax. Will your company be hit and if yes, how hard?
Global minimum tax rules, aka “Pillar Two Model Rules”, are set to go into effect in 2024. Developed as part of the OECD/G20 BEPS 2.0 project, these rules will dramatically change the international tax landscape and create significant new tax reporting and compliance requirements for affected organizations, in every industry.
With the clock ticking, your Finance organization needs to understand the potential impacts of these rules and develop a comprehensive technology-centered plan. Priorities to cover: adapting internal processes and systems to manage the new computations and data requirements, calculating your global minimum tax liabilities and satisfying reporting obligations. Saddle up!
We’ll ask Sveinung Baumann-Larsen at EY, Erika Buson at SAP and Matthias Klein at BASF for their take on The Arrival of Minimum Taxes: A New World Order.
The Buzz 1: “Purposeful storytelling isn’t show business, it’s good business.” [Peter Guber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, co-owner of NBA’s Golden State Warriors and MLB’s LA Dodgers]
The Buzz 2: “Good stories surprise us. They make us think and feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that a PowerPoint crammed with bar graphs never can.” [Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow, co-authors, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You]
The Buzz 3: “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.” [Robert McKee, Story Mentor]
These wise words about storytelling impact today’s Finance planning and analysis function, as the CFO’s team sees the value of weaving a narrative around actual events, explaining variances, and providing guidance.
As the role of Finance evolves to a strategic business partner, the team needs to equip itself with the right tools to be a great storyteller. Beyond old-school spreadsheets, they need modern analytics, trusted data and actionable dashboards so they can recommend and guide their organizations to make the best business decisions.
We’ll ask Brian Kalish, Pras Chatterjee and Greg Wright for their take on Enhanced Planning and Analysis: The Super-Power of Storytelling and Analytics.
The soccer great Pelé [the all-time leading goal scorer for Brazil with 77 goals in 92 games] famously and wisely observed, “No individual can win a game by himself.”
Pelé’s words stand true beyond the soccer pitch. In the business world, they resonate even louder for the Finance function. To bring the entire organization together in Planning and Analysis as well as strategy, Finance needs to adopt a “business partnership” mantra.
While it’s generally accepted that all lines of business in an organization will “plan”, bringing these plans together collaboratively requires financial and operational skills, technical savvy and most importantly, leadership.
As a leader and a business partner, Finance can become instrumental in enhancing the Planning and Analysis function to become an xP&A group – Extended Planning and Analysis – for organizational success, especially in our financially dynamic and turbulent times.
We’ll ask Anders Larsen Liu-Lindberg at The Business Partnering Institute, Pras Chatterjee at SAP, and Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect for their take on Pele's words of wisdom as we explore The Power of Business Partnering: Enhancing Planning and Analysis.
The Buzz 1: “Sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have extra. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle for companies looking to stay ahead of the competition and protect their bottom lines.[smart.arqlite.com]
The Buzz 2: “For companies focused on ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) efforts, metrics matter…Each industry and organization will have different metrics that are material to their business.” [gobyinc.com]
The Buzz 3: “Some companies report only their greenhouse gas emissions…others publish glossy reports about their CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives or use their ESG ratings as a badge of honor.” [hbr.org]
Yes, sustainability strategy and reporting are hot topics and management priorities for organizations’ internal and external stakeholders. Why? They can tangibly impact the ability to access finance, attract talent and grow market share.
The big picture: Worldwide compliance requirements are driving sustainability initiatives, but the metrics to manage and report against can vary by sector, by country, by strategy. Organizations need to not only make future commitments about sustainability metrics, but also to demonstrate their plan to maintain and improve overall corporate performance.
Forward-thinking organizations see sustainability reporting as an opportunity to spearhead new opportunities, efficiencies and growth, which require performance management capability and culture. Where to start?
We’ll ask Michel Haesendonckx at SAP and Esteban Rastrollo at EY for their insights on Sustainability Performance Management: Business Imperative vs Wishful Thinking?
Ah, taxes! A bit of “humor” on a definitely serious topic for every enterprise: * Benjamin Franklin: “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” * Bonnie Raitt: “Solar power is the last energy resource that isn't owned yet – nobody taxes the sun yet.” * Arthur C. Clarke: “The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.”
Ok, time to get serious. The EY 2020 Tax and Finance Operate survey reported that 51% of all respondents expected an increase to their organization’s tax risk profile from complying with emerging digital tax filing requirements, while a whopping 84% expected it to increase the workload of the tax and finance function.
EY’s 2022 Tax and Finance Operations Survey found 84% of respondents are actively transforming to tackle challenges. Talent, legislative and regulatory changes, and future-proofing technology are key concerns for Tax and Finance functions. And the COVID-19 pandemic worsened some challenges, accelerating the need to transform.
Reality check: With new regulatory announcements coming every month, your business needs to adapt your processes to remain sustainable and profitable.
How do intelligent businesses like yours take your tax transformation as a strategic turning point for operational efficiency and seamless compliance? Stop deprioritizing – or worse, ignoring – your company’s tax function in digital business transformation initiatives.
We’ll ask Erika Buson, Sveinung Baumann-Larsen and Vicky Bradford for their insights on The Digital Enterprise: Turning Taxes Into Opportunity!
The Buzz 1: “As specialized tools and technology have emerged, the role of CFO has evolved. CFOs of companies large and small need to embrace flexibility, develop global strategies, and shift their focus to look forward rather than back.” (www.teampay.co/insights/cfo-quotes/)
The Buzz 2: “When you are a successful company, you have to fight really hard to make sure you avoid complacency, arrogance, bureaucracy.” (Marianne Lake, CFO of JPMorgan Chase)
The Buzz 3: “The CFO needs to be supported by a strategic FP&A team that is excellent at all levels… a team that is prepared for where the company is going—not where it’s been.” (Jim Johnson, Former CFO of Adaptive Insights)
Amid globally turbulent times, today’s Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) function is striving to spend less of its time “Planning” and more time delivering value-added “Analysis” to its business constituents.
How? Finance and its IT support teams need to focus on the future, utilizing the available modern tools – Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Analytics and Collaboration. Similar to the automotive industry working to deliver safe, self-driving vehicles, FP&A needs to “feel the need, the need for speed” [quoting Lt. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in the Top Gun films] to drive automated or, even better, autonomous planning.
What steps can your FP&A team take to harness technology today in order to optimize their time delivering the best possible analysis to your organization tomorrow?
We’ll ask Finance professionals Paul Davis at Analysis Prime, Colin Chu at SAP and Nilly Essaides at NeuGroup for their take on Driving The Emphasis on Analysis for Finance: Focus on Automation.
The Buzz 1: In his 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, author and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. He calls this the Black Swan theory.
The Buzz 2: “If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.”
The Buzz 3: “We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences…generally are more meaningful.”
Gone are the days when, as a whole, Planning & Analysis for the office of the CFO and the enterprise could be ‘just OK.’
With black swan events becoming the norm, requiring guidance and scenario modeling, FP&A can no longer wait on gathering data from convoluted spreadsheets and uncollaborative business units.
Yes, the pressure is on the CFO to deliver highly credible plans and ever better analysis. But how?
The answer: Modern planning processes and tools – adopting extended planning and analysis, analytics and visualization, and machine learning – will help you transform your company’s Finance function from good to great.
We’ll ask Jon Essig at SimpleFi Solutions, Chris Ortega at Fresh FP&A, and Floyd Conrad at SAP for their take on The Black Swan vs Transforming Your FP&A from Good to Great!
The Buzz 1: “Tasked with guiding the growth of companies, building digital organizations, and transforming the finance function, CFOs must first identify their objectives and then decide whether they will lead with people, process, or performance.” (HBR Executive Brief: The CFO Agenda: Transforming the Finance Function)
The Buzz 2: “CFOs say that their time on transformations would be best spent on role-modeling new mindsets and behaviors, setting high-level goals, and communicating the transformation’s results—when, in practice, they are most often charged with traditional finance-oriented responsibilities.” (McKinsey: Mastering change: The new CFO mandate)
The Buzz 3: “Behavioral competencies are key to the business partnership role—a ‘seat at the table’ must be earned. A CFO needs to be a visible leader in the business, an excellent communicator, and an influencer.” (Paul Ainsworth – www.toptal.com/)
Modern Planning & Analysis transformation offers many benefits to the organizations that embrace it. Top-line benefits include extending planning across business units and LOB’s, connecting real time with ERP, and adopting predictive planning as a standard part of the process.
Good news: Powerful technology is available to help planners and the office of the CFO change processes to meet their enterprise-wide goals. Sounds great, just do it! But is technology the best, most effective way to begin?
Reality check: Adopting a modern extended planning and analysis process goes beyond merely adopting and adapting new technology. It needs to include – and begin with – a significant process transformation led by Finance.
We’ll ask Pras Chatterjee at SAP, Brian Kalish at Kalish Consulting and David Dixon at IBM for their take on Aligning with Planning & Analysis Transformation: Process Changes.
The Buzz 1: In his 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, author and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. He calls this the Black Swan theory.
The Buzz 2: “If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.”
The Buzz 3: “We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences…generally are more meaningful.”
Gone are the days when, as a whole, Planning & Analysis for the office of the CFO and the enterprise could be ‘just OK.’
With black swan events becoming the norm, requiring guidance and scenario modeling, FP&A can no longer wait on gathering data from convoluted spreadsheets and uncollaborative business units.
Yes, the pressure is on the CFO to deliver highly credible plans and ever better analysis. But how?
The answer: Modern planning processes and tools – adopting extended planning and analysis, analytics and visualization, and machine learning – will help you transform your company’s Finance function from good to great.
We’ll ask Jon Essig at SimpleFi Solutions, Chris Ortega at Fresh FP&A, and Floyd Conrad at SAP for their take on The Black Swan vs Transforming Your FP&A from Good to Great!
The Buzz 1: CFOs often perceive cybersecurity to be the responsibility of IT, but as more finance processes run remotely, CFOs need to develop security measures specifically for the finance function and not rely solely on the organization’s blanket security protocols to safeguard financial data. (www.gartner.com)
The Buzz 2: Finance leaders in the midst of leading or co-leading a broader transformation initiative (42% of CFOs, per Deloitte’s CFO Signals™ survey for Q2-2021), may want to make modernizing their security model part of that effort. (deloitte.wsj.com)
The Buzz 3: CFOs and their teams are the gatekeepers for the critical data required to generate forecasts and support senior leaders’ strategic plans and decisions…At the top of the four areas of technology that show the most promise for use in finance: automation and robotics to improve processes in finance.” (www.mckinsey.com)
Yes, organizations must find ways to thrive in today’s disruptive business environment, with its shifting geo-political and financial landscapes, the momentum to digitize and automate, and increasing cybersecurity threats.
How? Focus more on internal controls over most business processes as well as corporate resilience in financial and cybersecurity domains. Cybersecurity attacks not only affect normal business operations but add ambiguity to the reliability of financial statements.
Stakeholders are under pressure from due diligence requirements to gain more reliable views of organizational risk, resilience, accountability and transparency. To ensure quarterly and annual reports accurately reflect financial status and to bolster cybersecurity protection, they are automating process controls as part of a financial transformation.
We’ll ask Dr. Neil Patrick at SAP, Mithilesh Kotwal at Protiviti and Tony Robey at Wipro for their insights on Cyber Resilience and Control Automation for Finance.
The Buzz 1: We’ve all heard these 'old saws' and know they're true: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” “Plan your work and work your plan.”
The Buzz 2: “We don’t hand aircraft pilots 50 pages of Excel reports after they’ve landed the plane, telling them they went to the wrong airport or they ran out of fuel. They have real-time insight into the external environment and the aircraft operations.…It’s essential for FP&A and performance management to be viewed holistically like that…We should be helping to successfully land the aircraft.” (Jack Alexander, author: Financial Planning and Analysis and Business Performance Management)
The Buzz 3: “Gartner coined the term 'xP&A' in 2020, but…Expanding FP&A beyond finance has been a best practice for several years – referred to by many names: connected planning, collaborative enterprise planning, integrated business planning, and company-wide planning….” (https://insights.sap.com/what-is-xpa)
Better planning leads to better results, especially for the CFO's Finance team. But is “better” good enough in our era of perpetual business change and turmoil? Finance experts agree that more is needed to optimize Finance’s performance and value to the organization.
How? The Financial P&A profession needs to evolve to Extended Planning and Analysis 'xP&A' to strengthen cross-business collaboration, create aligned plans, and rapidly transition from gaining enterprise-wide insights to taking action. This requires not just the latest technology, but an overhaul of processes to align operational and financial planning with strategic goals.
We’ll ask Pras Chatterjee at SAP, Bryan Lapidus at the Association for Financial Professionals, and Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect for their insights on the Extended P&A Mindset: Time to Align on Strategic Goals.
The Buzz 1: We’ve all heard these 'old saws' and know they're true: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” “Plan your work and work your plan.”
The Buzz 2: “We don’t hand aircraft pilots 50 pages of Excel reports after they’ve landed the plane, telling them they went to the wrong airport or they ran out of fuel. They have real-time insight into the external environment and the aircraft operations.…It’s essential for FP&A and performance management to be viewed holistically like that…We should be helping to successfully land the aircraft.” (Jack Alexander, author: Financial Planning and Analysis and Business Performance Management)
The Buzz 3: “Gartner coined the term 'xP&A' in 2020, but…Expanding FP&A beyond finance has been a best practice for several years – referred to by many names: connected planning, collaborative enterprise planning, integrated business planning, and company-wide planning….” (https://insights.sap.com/what-is-xpa)
Better planning leads to better results, especially for the CFO's Finance team. But is “better” good enough in our era of perpetual business change and turmoil? Finance experts agree that more is needed to optimize Finance’s performance and value to the organization.
How? The Financial P&A profession needs to evolve to Extended Planning and Analysis 'xP&A' to strengthen cross-business collaboration, create aligned plans, and rapidly transition from gaining enterprise-wide insights to taking action. This requires not just the latest technology, but an overhaul of processes to align operational and financial planning with strategic goals.
We’ll ask Pras Chatterjee at SAP, Bryan Lapidus at the Association for Financial Professionals, and Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect for their insights on the Extended P&A Mindset: Time to Align on Strategic Goals.
The Buzz: Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School introduced the concept of a value chain in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance [2008]. Competitive advantage cannot be understood by looking at a firm as a whole. It stems from the many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product.” He adds that it's important to maximize value at each specific point in a firm's processes.
Finance organizations have increasingly evolved from backward-looking reporting to analyzing information in real-time, both from a financial accounting standpoint as well as management accounting.
Taking this a step further, finance is actively engaging in advising other parts of the business based on predictive modeling.
Logistical processes – ranging from procurement, supply chain, sales and customer experience, to even human resources – are all reflected in finance, providing a holistic view of an organization.
Finance then has the opportunity to leverage this information to evaluate the financial impact of strategic decisions and advise their counterparts in all lines of business across an organization.
We’ll ask SAP’s Birgit Starmanns, Accenture’s Rob Campanile and Ventana Research’s Robert Kugel for their take on Finance and Its Focus on Integration into the Value Chain.
The Buzz: “Data is now more valuable than oil” a popular business sentiment.
- In 2006, British mathematician and Tesco marketing mastermind Clive Humby shouted from the rooftops, “Data is the new oil.”
- Now “Data Isn't The New Oil — Time Is”. (Michael Kershner, founder of ILC)
- Oil has reigned for centuries as one of society’s most valuable resources…But in today’s 'data economy,' it can be argued that data, due to the insight and knowledge that can be extracted from it, is potentially more valuable. (Therese Fauerbach, CEO, The Northridge Group)
While this metaphor can be further debated, the power and abundance of data in its various forms hold a special place within the enterprise and especially within the Office of Finance.
But how the Financial Planning and Analysis [FP&A] function leverages operational and financial data in their day-to-day activities often remains a mystery.
With systems that connect data in a meaningful manner, what can Finance to do change processes and make impactful decisions to become a much more data driven function that better helps their business constituents and ultimately increases shareholder value?
We’ll ask Brian Kalish at Kalish Consulting, Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect, and Pras Chatterjee at SAP for their take on The Road to Finance Prosperity: Powered by Data.
The Buzz: Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School introduced the concept of a value chain in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance [2008]. Competitive advantage cannot be understood by looking at a firm as a whole. It stems from the many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product.” He adds that it's important to maximize value at each specific point in a firm's processes.
Finance organizations have increasingly evolved from backward-looking reporting to analyzing information in real-time, both from a financial accounting standpoint as well as management accounting.
Taking this a step further, finance is actively engaging in advising other parts of the business based on predictive modeling.
Logistical processes – ranging from procurement, supply chain, sales and customer experience, to even human resources – are all reflected in finance, providing a holistic view of an organization.
Finance then has the opportunity to leverage this information to evaluate the financial impact of strategic decisions and advise their counterparts in all lines of business across an organization.
We’ll ask SAP’s Birgit Starmanns, Accenture’s Rob Campanile and Ventana Research’s Robert Kugel for their take on Finance and Its Focus on Integration into the Value Chain.
The Buzz: Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School introduced the concept of a value chain in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance [2008]. Competitive advantage cannot be understood by looking at a firm as a whole. It stems from the many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product.” He adds that it's important to maximize value at each specific point in a firm's processes.
Finance organizations have increasingly evolved from backward-looking reporting to analyzing information in real-time, both from a financial accounting standpoint as well as management accounting.
Taking this a step further, finance is actively engaging in advising other parts of the business based on predictive modeling.
Logistical processes – ranging from procurement, supply chain, sales and customer experience, to even human resources – are all reflected in finance, providing a holistic view of an organization.
Finance then has the opportunity to leverage this information to evaluate the financial impact of strategic decisions and advise their counterparts in all lines of business across an organization.
We’ll ask SAP’s Birgit Starmanns, Accenture’s Rob Campanile and Ventana Research’s Robert Kugel for their take on Finance and Its Focus on Integration into the Value Chain.
The Buzz: The CFO role has expanded beyond financial duties to encompass strategic responsibilities across the company. After closing the books 12 months ago on the extraordinary year that was 2020, which threw unprecedented challenges across mostly unprepared industries and businesses worldwide, we began 2021 with high hopes for the start of a recovery, with the office of Finance having a central role.
Reality check: This optimism was tempered, with CFOs facing some of their toughest tests this year.
Today, with just 17 days before the dawning of 2022, we look in our rearview mirror at how 2021 has highlighted areas of concern in the agility and responsiveness of Finance systems. For many organizations, investments in systems that offered greater flexibility, agility and the resilience to cope with future challenges became paramount. Along with this, the pressing need to combat cyberattack threats and address information privacy concerns led to an increasing focus on risk management and the prevention and mitigation of breaches.
Today, three Finance experts share their POV on the Finance and Risk news headlines that illustrate the key themes and events that shaped business in 2021 – and the implications for the pandemic recovery and the future of Finance.
We’ll ask Nilly Essaide at NeuGroup, Pras Chatterjee at SAP, and Grant Small at Legion Star for their take on Finance Ripped from the Headlines: A 2021 Finance and Risk Retrospective.
The Buzz 1: “Change management is a critical skill in today’s c-suite… Change management is a challenge for every organization.” (Dave Sutton, toprightpartners.com)
The Buzz 2: “Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.” (Philip Crosby, 1926–2001, aka “The Fun Uncle of the Quality Revolution”, author: Quality Without Tears and Quality is Free)
The Buzz 3: “Change before you have to.” (Jack Welch, former GE CEO, named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine)
The Buzz 4: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!” (Peter Senge, organizational learning expert, author: The Fifth Discipline)
As finance and risk teams embrace technology more quickly than they did in the past, change management has never been more crucial to facilitate efficient adoption and effective implementation.
With more organizations moving towards modern technologies for Finance – including automation and artificial intelligence (AI) – there is often resistance to change as well as fear of being “replaced” by computers.
As business conditions and business models change, finance and risk teams need to transform their own organizations to take advantage of technology advancements – while ensuring the human element remains at the center of their strategic decisions.
For these reasons and more, change management needs to focus on best practices and comprehensive organizational planning for change, from executive buy-in on changes in technology and business processes, to the communication of the what, the when, and the why of a change.
We’ll ask Birgit Starmanns at SAP, Jason Roling at Delaware Consulting and Ross Wilson at Accenture for their take on Enabling Intelligent Finance Transformation with Change Management.
The Buzz 1: The early development of accounting was closely related to developments in writing, counting, and money.…Accounting records dating back more than 7,000 years have been found in Mesopotamia, and documents from ancient Mesopotamia show lists of expenditures, and goods received and traded…all emerged in the context of controlling goods, stocks and transactions in the temple economy of Mesopotamia.” (en.wikipedia.org)
The Buzz 2: “When I talk to other CFOs about process improvement, they often tell me that their top priority is closing the books faster…Poor-quality data can’t be trusted, and it takes a lot of labor to scrub bad data.” (Perry D. Wiggins, CPA)
The Buzz 3: Of the 2,300 organizations that answered APQC’s General Accounting Open Standards Benchmarking survey, the bottom 25% said they need 10 or more calendar days to perform the monthly close process. … the top 25% can wrap up a monthly close in just 4.8 days or less—about half the time of the bottom 25%. … at the median are the organizations that need 6.4 calendar days to close out a month’s books.” (www.cfo.com)
Since the 13th century, accountants have been “closing the books” to give company owners a status on their business performance. And since this happens at all companies at every period-end, you'd think that by 2021, everyone has a perfect, optimized process. But period-end closing still has a reputation of being a burden – causing headaches and overtime.
We’ll ask experts Marc Six, Katharina Reichert and David Dixon to share their insights about closing acceleration and business trends affecting Finance teams each and every period-end on Fast, Faster, Fastest: What's Next for the Close?
The Buzz: “FP&A [financial planning and analysis] used to hold all the cards; they had all the data at their fingertips. Nowadays, valuable data resides across the business. It’s a battle to find out who has the best data, much less what this data is. Otherwise, a vacuum will develop that smart executives will fill up with their own data. The CFO has to be on top of information flow at all times.” (Mark Partin, CFO of BlackLine)
The recent FP&A Trends 2021 Survey highlights that many FP&A practitioners struggle to create time to work on value added activities. From the most senior to the novice FP&A practitioners, there is still (too) much time spent on non-value-added tasks such as gathering data, excess time providing meaningful insights and having trust in the data.
How does FP&A overcome these challenges?
Tune in to hear FP&A experts' insights on how easily the available, yet disruptive technologies – such as AI/ML, Integration tools and an xP&A (extended planning and analysis) process – can help bring the FP&A practice to the top of the ladder when it comes to driving organizational-wide decisions.
We’ll ask Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect, Hans Gobin at Plan2Plan Consulting, and Floyd Conrad for their take on Data: The Road to Value Add for FP&A.
The Buzz 1: “The subscription economy is not new. In fact, the membership-based business model has been around since the 17th century…Recently, the membership-based business model has been gaining a foothold…Experts believe that the membership-based business model is the revenue model of the future.” (boldbusiness.com)
The Buzz 2: “Building long-term relationships with customers is the route to value in the Subscription Economy®. Yet the Quote-to-Cash (QTC) process at most B2B companies—even those with subscription businesses—is optimized for linear transactions, not relationships. This results in complexity and cost to the provider and a poor experience for the subscriber.” (subscribed.com)
The ‘new normal’ has challenged businesses worldwide during the COVID pandemic. Instead of focusing on revenue growth, most companies were just trying to find new ways to serve their customers and survive, including pivoting their business model to offer product-related services and subscriptions. Some have developed partnerships to facilitate product delivery and installation during pandemic lockdowns – and plan to expand these services.
To facilitate this business expansion, flexibility of how companies bill – and how customers pay – is paramount. Some customers may use multiple payment types for the same transaction, even with the option to pay a residual over time. There may be revenue-sharing with the partners that took on delivery and other services, long-term subscriptions or pay-as-you-go usage-based billing – and a developing trend of outcome-based billing.
We’ll ask Manoj Harbhajanka at Acuitilabs and Richard Chan at SAP for their insights on how different business models are evolving and how billing systems need to keep pace, on “Pivoting from a Product to a Service and Subscription Economy.”
The Buzz 1: “AI will optimize or transform ‘nearly every activity in finance.’” (Craig Wilton, Gartner, quoted at www.cfodive.com/news/artificial-intelligence-gartner-finance-trends-2020/573233/)
The Buzz 2: “Tech is in everything… 2021’s CFOs need to be more tech-savvy than ever. Indeed, with so much big data, A.I., and robotics technology available for CFOs to utilize, learning and incorporating tech into the traditional finance role is key.” (fortune.com/2021/06/21/cfo-technology-big-data-ai-robotics/)
As we begin to come out of the pandemic, the ways of doing business have inevitably changed. Companies have discovered ways to be more flexible, respond faster to changing economic conditions, better serve customers, redefine supplier relationships, and create more efficient internal processes.
CFOs at mid-market companies in particular are more invested in going beyond the status quo. By embracing automation and artificial intelligence (AI), they are optimizing their own processes to then provide valued advice at the executive table, armed with real-time insights and AI-driven predictions of the financial outcomes of strategic decisions.
And with their time freed-up by automation, Finance can collaborate better with other lines of business, including leveraging AI to investigate the financial impact of strategies from core finance processes on HR, manufacturing, and sales.
We’ll ask Birgit Starmanns at SAP, Dan Cupersmith at Analysis Prime and Bryan Pruner at Delaware Consulting for their take on Automation and AI: Helping Mid-Market CFOs Guide and Collaborate with the Business.
The Buzz: “I’m not paid or evaluated on the accuracy of my crystal-ball predictions. I’m paid to enumerate every possible outcome and do something about every possible outcome well in advance, when it’s still possible to do something, because once it’s happened it’s too late.” (Marty Chavez, Former CFO, Goldman Sachs)
Is your organization struggling with finance transformation and future steering? How differently should you approach long-term thinking and planning, to be better prepared for future events and disruptions? It’s time for answers!
A comprehensive enterprise-wide planning strategy goes beyond visualization and reporting. It entails enabling extended planning and analysis across the various lines of business, leveraging real-time insights and predictive capabilities for effective decision-making to bring everyone together.
Innovating and empowering your business users through modern cloud-based solutions and models accompanied by AI-driven insights will help your organization stay agile and gain fast time-to-value to make the best business decisions, given our “new normal“ dynamic market changes.
We’ll ask Pras Chatterjee at SAP and Jumen Rest and Neil Morton at PwC for their take on Extended Planning and Analysis for Resilient and Sustainable Organizations.
The Buzz 1: “Indirect attacks against weak links in the supply chain now account for 40 percent of security breaches.” (Accenture Security / Third State of Cyber Resilience Report, www.ironnet.com)
The Buzz 2: Cybersecurity in the supply chain cannot be viewed as an IT problem only. Cyber supply chain risks touch sourcing, vendor management, supply chain continuity and quality, transportation security and many other functions across the enterprise and require a coordinated effort to address.” (csrc.nist.gov)
In a renewed focus on supply chain risk management and protection, and to vet their suppliers’ cybersecurity maturity, the US Department of Defense and federal government have established the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). Direct suppliers and others will be required to reach a prescribed level of maturity and be certified by a third party just to qualify to do business with state and federal agencies.
Industry observers expect these requirements will be adopted in the commercial space to mitigate supply chain risk there, as well.
Heads-up to all CFOs: Not attaining CMMC certification for your supply chain cybersecurity may impact your ability to drive revenue and to do business.
We’ll discuss why CFOs needs to focus on supply chain management impact on cash flow, working capital and shareholder value; best practices for supply chain risk management; the importance of these federal and state guidelines; and how to identify, define, and automate the essential data handling and security controls for sensitive data within the supply chain.
We’ll ask Keyaan J. Williams at CLASS-LLC, Keng Lim at NextLabs and Anne Marie Colombo at SAP for their take on CFOs: Get Ready for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification!
The Buzz: “A majority of executives and investment professionals agreeing that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs enhance shareholder value…Finance leaders can help spur companies to develop sustainability goals by articulating the financial benefits of sustainability projects and establishing criteria for funding the company’s ESG investments that account for their full range of benefits.” www.cfo.com
Sustainability isn’t just a global agenda. It’s a corporate agenda and a topic driving fervent discussion in board meetings around the world. Not surprisingly, the Office of the CFO is key and central to these discussions.
Regulations and standards are still emerging and differ across geographies. One thing is clear: organizations will need to be accountable, responsible and in compliance with sustainability requirements, or face significant consequences.
But many forward-looking organizations see sustainability as an opportunity to create something better, to become leaders in building sustainable profitable businesses. And sustainability will be a new way of doing business, meeting compliance, ethical and moral obligations while carving new competitive advantages. To achieve this, technology will play a big part in their change process.
How can your organization prepare for the business and systems transformations needed for this brave new sustainable world?
We’ll ask Simon Meitz and Jon Scott at EY, and Michel Haesendonckx at SAP for their take on Sustainability: A 21st Century Challenge for the CFO.
The Buzz: “As companies craft their responses to the COVID-19 crisis, CFOs are in the thick of the action. They need to make sure that their organizations weather the immediate business shocks while preparing them to emerge from the crisis in the best possible shape.” (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/cfo-leadership-in-the-covid-19-crisis)
As we move to what is hopefully the beginning of the end of the global pandemic, companies are gearing up to regain strength as we expect the economy to rebound. More than ever, the role of the CFO continues to expand, as resources in finance and risk teams must stay in lock step with the business to anticipate and guide strategy to help companies during the economic recovery.
Cash management is a key aspect of ensuring a company has the financial resources to thrive, through optimization of working capital, cash flow, and the close with real-time insight.
We’ll ask Anthony Coletta at SAP, Molly Boyle at Blackline and Luke Carlson at Carlson Cash for their take on Quick Wins to Drive Value for CFOs in the Post-Pandemic Business World.
The Buzz: “The original inspiration behind the title 'Ripped from the Headlines' was the Warner Brothers film studio’s stock tagline, 'Torn from today's headlines!', used often beginning in the 1930s to promote the gritty realism of their 'social problem' films. The Evil Twin of this trope is “Could This Happen to You?” [tvtropes.org]
What’s the latest news on the street that impacts FP&A? Or perhaps the better question is, “What’s the latest news in your home office, study, spare bedroom or kitchen table?”, depending on the distance of your home-working commute!
It's time to take a look at topical content from current news headlines to learn how today’s hot topics will affect FP&A professionals today, tomorrow and farther into the future.
We may be locked in, but that’s no reason to be out of touch.
We’ll ask Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect, Thiagu Bala at Deloitte and David Williams at SAP for their perspectives on Ripped from the Headlines: Financial Planning and Analysis.
The Buzz: “CFOs have recognized that surviving is not enough…2021 promises to be an epic year for CFOs and the companies they lead…the struggles of 2020 have taught us all many hard lessons, and these lessons will be used by elite CFOs to create a faster, more flexible, more competitive, and ultimately more profitable organization.” (forbes.com)
Our first Financial Excellence Radio show of 2020 – January 28 – focused on a bright future for Finance and Finance professionals, with systems and processes underpinned by new and ever-improving technologies.
Boom! Little did we know the impact COVID-19 would have on our lives or the unprecedented challenges it would pose to Finance, Financial Management and business survival.
We’ll ask Kalish Consulting’s Brian Kalish, Deloitte’s Swapna Satwik and SAP’s Martin Naraschewski to debate the opportunity for Finance to reflect and reset priorities for transformation.
Join us for Finance 2021 – Where Do We Go from Here?
The Buzz: “CFOs have recognized that surviving is not enough…2021 promises to be an epic year for CFOs and the companies they lead…the struggles of 2020 have taught us all many hard lessons, and these lessons will be used by elite CFOs to create a faster, more flexible, more competitive, and ultimately more profitable organization.” (forbes.com)
Our first Financial Excellence Radio show of 2020 – January 28 – focused on a bright future for Finance and Finance professionals, with systems and processes underpinned by new and ever-improving technologies.
Boom! Little did we know the impact COVID-19 would have on our lives or the unprecedented challenges it would pose to Finance, Financial Management and business survival.
We’ll ask Kalish Consulting’s Brian Kalish, Deloitte’s Swapna Satwik and SAP’s Martin Naraschewski to debate the opportunity for Finance to reflect and reset priorities for transformation.
Join us for Finance 2021 – Where Do We Go from Here?
The Buzz: “CFOs are focused on the battle to survive and maintain cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis. But…finance leaders are learning valuable new ways to manage risk in the future.” (fm-magazine.com)
In the past when we predicted the future, “2020” was far enough out that possibilities seemed endless, near-term enough that predictions could be extrapolated from historical trends. But no one saw “this 2020” coming, and now we almost have 2020 hindsight.
We’ve experienced change that could not be planned for, with financial markets reacting daily to lockdowns, shelter-in-place rules, business restrictions. What were the financial implications of this turbulent year? How will CFOs respond to external forces and plan for continued disruption? What new business models can help them innovate?
We’ll ask Birgit Starmanns and Kevin McCollom at SAP and Rizal Ahmed at SAPInsider for their insights on 2020 Hindsight to 2021 Foresight: Finance Implications for Turbulent Times.
The Buzz: “CFOs are focused on the battle to survive and maintain cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis. But…finance leaders are learning valuable new ways to manage risk in the future.” (fm-magazine.com)
In the past when we predicted the future, “2020” was far enough out that possibilities seemed endless, near-term enough that predictions could be extrapolated from historical trends. But no one saw “this 2020” coming, and now we almost have 2020 hindsight.
We’ve experienced change that could not be planned for, with financial markets reacting daily to lockdowns, shelter-in-place rules, business restrictions. What were the financial implications of this turbulent year? How will CFOs respond to external forces and plan for continued disruption? What new business models can help them innovate?
We’ll ask Birgit Starmanns and Kevin McCollom at SAP and Rizal Ahmed at SAPInsider for their insights on 2020 Hindsight to 2021 Foresight: Finance Implications for Turbulent Times.
The Buzz: “Treasury is still a very young and new function. In sociology, we would speak of generation X…New regulations, new technologies, an interconnection and correlation between markets, economies and continents – will force the treasury function to evolve.” [linkedin.com]
The economic downturn caused by COVID-19 has forced treasurers to re-evaluate their cash management and working capital strategies. While trying to keep up with the crisis, they are also looking to strengthen their operations to wither away future crises.
There are a few key areas of focus that will become foundation for the future of treasury – accelerated digitalization, efficient management of working capital, and process automation and control.
We’ll ask Haresh Chhaya at SAP and Erik Smolders and Abhinav Sethi at Deloitte to discuss these focus areas and the possibilities for corporate treasuries as they embark on their re-envisioned journeys on Rethinking Your Treasury Operations in Uncertain Times.
The Buzz X 9: We’ll ask finance experts Birgit Starmanns, Pras Chatterjee and Kevin McCollom at SAP to share their POV on the real stories behind nine recent business, media and popular press headlines:
- Is Working Remotely the Future of Finance? (cfo.com)
- Temporary Layoffs Just Became Permanent for Millions of American Workers (cnn.com)
- Stock Futures Point Higher After Chaotic Weekend (seekingalpha.com)
- How CFOs Can Be Better Leaders in the Age of COVID-19 (knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu)
- Making strategic Planning Relevant in An Uncertain World (fm-magazine.com)
- Walmart Signs Drone Deals As It Races to Play Catch-Up with Amazon (cnbc.com)
- Coronavirus: Five Firms Booming Despite the Lockdown (bbc.com)
- Cloud vs On-Premise (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
- Punches Thrown Over Passenger Who Won't Wear Mask on Airplane (msn.com)
Join us for Ripped from the Headlines: Planning, Finance and Risk in the News.
The Buzz: “Gaining a greater understanding of your profitability requires more analysis than a financial statement and a balance sheet. By doing a profitability analysis, companies can identify areas in need of attention.” centage.com Profitability analysis is among the key benchmark criteria for profit-making organizations, providing the “bottom-line” marker of success.
What role should it play in times of uncertainty like today, when markets are disrupted, supply chains are broken, costs are spiraling, and revenue streams are in disarray? It can help wrestle control of costs, identify business value, simulate and assess alternative courses, and focus on the most profitable parts of the business. Are more tailored profitability analysis and measures needed?
We’ll ask Gary Cokins at Analytics-Based Performance Management, Sveinung Baumann-Larsen at EY, and Michel Haesendonckx at SAP to share their insights on Profitability Analysis: Challenging Times Call for Flexible Measures.
The Buzz: “We’ve come a long way in finance and accounting. From purely manual bookkeeping carried out in large, dusty, paper ledgers, through to Excel-based solutions and advanced accounting systems, we’ve been plunged into the exciting world of intelligent automation.” www.digitalistmag.com
Finance is used to a “white box” set of tools for analysis, with traceable logic and steps. But a “black box”, with hidden inner workings, is needed for more complex processes. And Finance is again on the forefront, adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence. First steps are usually transaction-oriented. Sophisticated scenarios are predictive, using simulations with combinations of drivers for more comprehensive decision support based on data.
We’ll ask Birgit Starmanns at SAP, Rob Kugel at Ventana Research, and JS Irick and Daniel Settanni at TruQua about the real value of machine learning on the bottom line and how it supports, not replaces, the human decision-making process.
The buzz: “As companies and government agencies send their employees home to avoid contact with the coronavirus, many cyber-security teams are facing the unenviable challenge of securing sprawling, vulnerable networks. Every time an employee connects to their corporate network from home, they’re creating possible access points for hackers to exploit. When this happens 1,000 times on a single network almost overnight, as it has amid orders for regional lockdowns, it’s increasingly difficult to ensure every connection is secure.” (www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/03/19/561702.htm)
We’ll ask security experts James Roeske at Customer Advisory Group, and Erin Hughes and Anne Marie Colombo at SAP for their insights about the imperatives and opportunities to strengthen your organization’s information risk protection against massive scale financial fraud, cyberattacks and information theft. Join us for Gimme Shelter: Coping with Security Challenges of the New Remote Working World.
The buzz: “Unlocking the potential of machine learning for the office of finance remains a hot topic for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) leaders….” (financialexecutives.org)
During these tumultuous times, organizations more than ever need better tools and technologies to predict the future. Why? The CFO is under immense pressure to make sense of all internal and external factors, evaluating the impact of lines of credit, working capital, sales targets, expense reduction and pursuing new opportunities. Good news: Many CFOs and FP&A teams are already using Machine Learning and Predictive technologies to get closer to certainty. But can Finance trust these new technologies? How, when fully deployed, do they impact operations and the role of Finance? How is company leadership positioned on these challenges? We’ll ask Brian Kalish at Kalish Consulting, Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect and Pras Chatterjee at SAP for their insights on Leveraging Predictive Planning to Ease Uncertainty.
Financial Excellence with Game-Changers, presented by SAP, presents a special one-on-one conversation with Birgit Starmanns, the Global Head of the oCFO – COE Thought Leadership Strategy and Programs for Finance and Risk at SAP. Birgit is a co-sponsor of this series.
Birgit speaks with host Bonnie D. Graham about how change management has never been more crucial to executing Finance tasks and minimizing risks today. “As Finance and risk teams work almost exclusively remotely under ‘stay at home’ orders, change has come more quickly and will have a lasting effect. In the aftermath, there is a need for best practices that can be shared with teams to enable them to be effective in a virtual world.” She emphasizes that communicating changes – especially the “why” and executive buy-in – is key to overcoming a resistance to change, especially with the workforce fearful of losing their jobs to automation.
Don’t miss this lively, insight-packed conversation with Birgit Starmanns!
Financial Excellence with Game-Changers, presented by SAP, presents a special one-on-one conversation with Pras Chatterjee, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Planning & Analysis at SAP focusing on SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation. Pras is a frequent panelist on this series.
Pras speaks with host Bonnie D. Graham about how, despite all the changes in today’s economic climate, the Finance function and specifically FP&A has a unique opportunity to elevate its stats. The current pessimism can also exhibit some optimism if the right FP&A team operates the right way with the right tools. It may not be business as usual for a while, but that doesn’t mean FP&A can’t provide some unusual, but tested tactics to help make things a lot better.
Pras also shares his strategy for immediate steps Finance can take to assist their business partners now. Don’t miss this candid, insight-packed conversation with Pras Chatterjee!
The buzz: “There’s limited precedent into how a global pandemic like COVID-19 will impact financial services organizations as they prepare to complete their first virtual close” (www2.deloitte.com). Every CFO and finance team needs to close the books at period-end. But now, as the current pandemic has pushed accountants and other white-collar workers to their home offices, there’s talk about a “Virtual Close” and whether companies are ready to close the books remotely. Financial processes, from daily transactions to publishing financial results, will need to be carried out in a virtual environment. Two types of leaders will emerge. The forward-looking will see a new opportunity to make a lasting impact on their businesses and ensure seamless execution to preserve business continuity. The others will simply pull back. We’ll ask Molly Boyle at Blackline, Imran Lodhi at TruQua and Katharina Reichert at SAP for their take on Welcome to a New World: The Virtual Financial Close.
The buzz: “Creating a strong FP&A team comes down to two things: innovation and engagement” (Nevine White). Amid global uncertainty, new pressure is on your Finance Department’s Planning & Analysis resources to go beyond budgets. They’re being asked to model dire scenarios and potential opportunities on the fly, gather inputs and steer the enterprise with as much ‘certainty’ as possible, given the immediate impact of previously unrecognized market forces. How can FP&A re-model their function, lead cross-department changes and use technology to lead the business to success? The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, The Hackett Group: “When the wind of change blows, some build walls and others build windmills” (Proverb). Ingmar Christiaens, EY: “Imagination is more important than knowledge” (Einstein). Pras Chatterjee, SAP: “A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life” (Muhammed Ali). JoIn us for FP&A: Planning with Certainty Amidst Uncertainty.
The buzz: “Today we are at a turning point in tax.… The new digital tax function is now evolving at great pace to become a strategic component of enterprise transformation” (internationaltaxreview.com). Tax functions in many organizations are yet to fully embrace integrated technology as a critical enabler to tackling a growing reporting and compliance burden. The downside? They’re focusing too much time and effort on reporting and file preparation, rather than using tech to create valuable business insights and intelligence to aid strategic decision making. But the tide is turning. Experts Matthias Klein at BASF, Sveinung Baumann-Larsen at EY, and Michel Haesendonckx at SAP will discuss the merits of using advanced platform technologies, applied with the right know-how, skills and resources to elevate the tax function from merely compliance to becoming a strategic business partner. JoIn us for Don’t Let Tax Become Too Taxing.
The buzz: “Consumers with a high level of digital trust spend more” (CA Technologies Report 2018). As consumers, producers and employees, we share and use massive amounts of sensitive and private information. The ability to establish and maintain “digital trust” in data protection and privacy is becoming a key businesses competitive differentiator. Digital trust is hard build, but can be lost with a single data breach. How trustworthy is your organization? The experts speak. Heather Federman, BigID: “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them” (George Bernard Shaw). John Livingood, Protiviti: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently” (Warren Buffet). Chris Radkowski, SAP: “If you build it, he will come” (Field of Dreams). JoIn us for The Demands of Digital Trust: Data Protection and Privacy in 2020.
The buzz: “There’s no question over the last year this new wave of technologies has had an impact on CFO decision making.” (Sandy Cockrell, Deloitte). Integration, big data, in-memory, ML and AI are a few of the disruptions that dominated FP&A professionals’ tech conversations in the 20-teens. Despite geopolitical and economic uncertainties, tech innovation and growth are certain to continue. How should your FP&A team prepare to navigate what could be another decade of big change? The experts speak. Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself” (Tolstoy). Larysa Melnychuk, International FP&A Board: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” (Einstein). Pras Chatterjee, SAP: “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high, and we miss it, but that it is too low, and we reach it” (Michelangelo). JoIn us for 2020 Vision: What Will Drive FP&A in 2020 and Beyond?
The buzz: “CFOs must recognize their roles as agents of change charged with driving technological transformation across their companies” (digitalistmag.com). We began 2019 with a rush of activity, discussing which industries would emerge, the tech trends that would help Finance and risk professionals, and new disruptive technologies and industry trends where Finance and risk would play a key role. Today, from informed hindsight, three experts reflect on the year and predict what 2020 might bring for Finance. The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, Hackett Group: “The fragile wants tranquility, the anti-fragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much” (Nassim Taleb). Corey Olson, TruQua: “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again” (Graeme Wood). Michael Emerson, SAP: “The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything” (Greta Thunberg). Join us for 2019: Reflections on a Year in Finance, Collaborative Planning, and Risk.
The buzz: “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event…The question, then, isn’t whether, but when—and how—to enter the emerging experience economy” (hbr.org). To be successful in building new digital experiences, Finance needs to ensure the viability of business models transformation. Finance has an opportunity to help your business deliver unparalleled experience to internal and external customers. How? By leveraging intelligent innovations across financial, operational and analytical capabilities to confidently predict and act in real time. The experts speak. Usman Aijaz, Deloitte Consulting: “Let us add a little joy to your day” (Starbucks). David A. Davidson, Accenture Strategy: “The pace of change has never been this fast, and it will never be this slow again” (Graeme Wood). Join us for How to Transform Finance in the Experience Economy.
The buzz: “There’s no question over the last year this new wave of technologies has had an impact on CFO decision making …” (Sandy Cockrell, Deloitte). Collaborative Enterprise Planning: myth or reality? Cloud-based planning systems have made it easier to connect and align plans from all departments and business units across your organization. But questions loom large about how deep and detailed your Finance Office’s plans should go, given the shift towards more ERP-centric planning solutions with more granularity. How should Finance lead and direct Zero-Based Budgeting and Driver-Based Planning? Where do Machine Learning and Augmented Analytics fit into this new picture? The experts speak. Thiago Bala, Deloitte: “Do. Or do not. There is no try” (Yoda). Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “Fortune befriends the bold” (Emily Dickinson). Pras Chatterjee, SAP: “I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try” (Bart Simpson). JoIn us for Full Steam Ahead: Finance and Planning Together At Last.
The buzz: “Financial fraud isn't new, and the extent of the crime can vary significantly…Most cases have at least one person, but often a group of fraudsters…” (businessinsider.com). CFOs: It’s a fact. While digitalization speeds up business processes, it creates new opportunities for fraudsters to exploit gaps that can escape traditional detection methods. A typical organization incurs fraud-related losses equivalent to 5% of annual revenue. How can you ensure your corporate assets are protected against fraudulent activities and address threats before they happen? The experts speak. Manish Singh, Deloitte: “If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you” (Steve Jobs). Steve Biskie, RSM: “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way” (Napoleon Hill). Tomás Kong, SAP: “A penny saved is a penny earned” (Benjamin Franklin). Join us for Fraud: How to Protect Your Organization from Threats?
The buzz: “Contrary to popular imagination, the finance world of the future will not be manned by a robot army. It will, instead, comprise of a team of trusted advisors in the organization utilizing advanced tech (David Chase). Finance leaders now understand that intelligent applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things and predictive analytics can help them improve business processes. How? These apps create new levels of insight, prediction, and efficiencies to empower Finance to drive enterprise-wide growth and strategic initiatives, invent new business models and revenue streams, and serve as the business advisor to the enterprise. And every CFO wants that! The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, The Hackett Group: “There is no genius without a touch of madness (Aristotle). Jason White, SAP: “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less” (C.S. Lewis). Join us for What Makes Finance ‘Intelligent’?
The buzz: “Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business” (Jeff Bezos). Attention CFOs: You may think you have a grasp of true profitability, but your insights may be incomplete. Yes, you have a good feel for gross margins and direct costs. But do you truly understand how your business consumes variable or overhead costs, how IT costs are consumed and charged, or which customer groups and product lines add the most or detract from your bottom line? The experts speak. Rob Kugel, Ventana Research: “Never ask for money spent, where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant, to remember or invent, what he did with every cent” (Robert Frost). Michael Rea, Tartan Solutions: “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Michel Haesendonckx, SAP: “The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine” (John Howard). Join us for Financial Hide and Seek: Uncovering Hidden Profit and Costs.
The buzz: “The prevailing theory today is that the data was stolen by a nation-state for spying purposes, not by criminals looking to cash in on stolen identities (Kate Fazzini, cnbc.com). Remember the 2017 Equifax data breach that affected millions of credit card users? Graeme Payne, Equifax SVP and CIO, was held responsible and fired. What does your C-Suite need to know about cybersecurity and its relationship to enterprise and cyber risk management? The experts speak. Graeme Payne, Cybersecurity4Executives: “If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk” (Lord Baden-Powell). Manash Saha, Protivi: “You may say I'm a dreamer…”(John Lennon). Fiona Williams, Deloitte: “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky (R. Tagore). Anne Marie Colombo, SAP: “There are no secrets to success….” (Colin Powell). Join us for CyberRisk: Keeping Your CFO Awake At Night!
The buzz: “Contrary to popular imagination, the finance world of the future will not be manned by a robot army. It will, instead, comprise of a team of trusted advisors in the organization utilizing advanced tech (David Chase). Finance leaders now understand that intelligent applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things and predictive analytics can help them improve business processes. How? These apps create new levels of insight, prediction, and efficiencies to empower Finance to drive enterprise-wide growth and strategic initiatives, invent new business models and revenue streams, and serve as the business advisor to the enterprise. And every CFO wants that! The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, The Hackett Group: “There is no genius without a touch of madness (Aristotle). Jason White, SAP: “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less” (C.S. Lewis). Join us for What Makes Finance ‘Intelligent’?
The buzz: “We not only possess the tools to take FP&A to new heights, but FP&A will have to soar for organizations to thrive in the 21st century.” (B. Kalish) The Intelligent Enterprise enables Finance to access data from all parts of the organization and to readily combine relevant financial data with operational data to make better decisions. How can the FP&A function become a leader, progressing from helping tomorrow’s decisions to helping drive today’s decisions? The experts speak. Bryan Lapidus, Association for Financial Professionals: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed” (W.Gibson). Parminder Ghatahora, TruQua: “…The stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind” (Bruce Lee). Pras Chatterjee, SAP: “On a team, it’s not the strength of the individual players, but it is the strength of the unit and how they all function together” (B.Belichick). Join us for Future of FP&A: Leading the Enterprise.
The buzz: “Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them” (Gone with the Wind). What’s keeping CFOs up at night? In 80% of countries, federal tax authorities use electronic data extraction to perform tax audits. One in 4 countries requires taxpayers to submit tax data electronically. Our panel will discuss the urgent need for consistent, real-time tax information to enable Finance departments to respond and remain compliant with each new requirement. The experts speak. Mark Truchan, PwC: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” (Einstein). Michael Bernard, Vertex: “If you drive a car, I'll tax the street, If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat…” (The Beatles). Lane Leskela, SAP: “When I’m not in my right mind, my left mind gets pretty crowded” (S. Wright), Kevin McCollom, SAP: “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know” (H.S. Truman). Join us for Automating Finance Operations: Value-Added Tax Reporting.
The buzz: “CFOs are challenged with turning the numbers into something meaningful…to derive insights and deliver information to the rest of the organization (Chris Pass). What’s keeping CFOs awake at night? They need to oversee day-to-day operations amid changing market dynamics while guiding the business strategically to drive innovation and growth. How? Eliminate outdated IT limitations. Harness new technologies. Automate repetitive tasks. Manage risk and compliance. The goal: an intelligent finance organization. The experts speak. Melanie Noronha, The Economist Intelligence Unit: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” (Helen Keller). Sam Parikh, Deloitte: “When you attack a problem as if it were solvable, even if you don’t know how to solve it, you’ll be shocked with what you come up with” (Peter Diamandis). Neil Krefsky, SAP: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” (Alphonse Karr) Join us for Get Smart! The Intelligent Finance Organization.
The buzz: “There’s no question over the last year this new wave of technologies has had an impact on CFO decision making (Sandy Cockrell, Deloitte). Similar to personal New Year’s resolutions, businesses are kicking off 2019 with new goals including corporate responsibility and diversity. How to get there? Finance and risk executives can harness emerging technology tools – artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive capabilities – to help determine the best course of action. The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, Hackett Group: “The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance” (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Julien Delvat, TruQua: “May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers” (Dan Brown). David Williams, SAP: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships” (Michael Jordan). Join us for Predictions 2019: Finance, Collaborative Planning, and Risk.
The buzz: “Surround yourself with the right team and ensure continuous communication with each other… provide leadership, but you also have to give your team authority and accountability (Barb Niland, Huntington Ingalls Industries). Enabling Finance organizations to be a more strategic partner to the business requires moving away from repetitive, error-prone manual tasks, and rearview. Simple solution: new technologies for managing real-time, continuous processes. Reality-check solution: a change management process and constant communication to support each Finance team member’s success. The experts speak. Julien Delvat, TruQua: “I'd change the world if I could change my mind” (Union, Black Eyed Peas). Prof. Dr. Kai Reinhardt, HTW Berlin: “’42,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm” (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Peter T. Rasper, SAP: “Why does it always rain on me?” (Travis). Join us for Strategic Finance Magic Sauce: Change Management and Communication.
The buzz: “One of the main cyber-risks is to think they don’t exist. The other is to try to treat all potential risks” (Stephane Nappo). The sharp rise in global cybersecurity threats could cost $2T by 2019, quadruple from 2015. Information security leaders should fear phishing and malware attacks on employees and customers, brand impersonation, and all information breaches. Is your company monitoring, detecting and countering threats to critical data and applications? The experts speak. Ted Keniston, Protiviti: “If you do the things you need to do when you need to do then, then someday you can do the things you want to do...” (John C. Maxwell). Kevin D. Heckel, Deloitte: “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” (Winston Churchill). Michael Golz, SAP: “It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe” (1916). Join us for Cybersecurity Threats and Finance: Are You Protected?
The buzz: “The planning process – planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analysis – presents a formidable challenge to many companies, regardless of size or industry” (CFO.com). Modern business technology is enabling a holistic approach to planning for an entire organization: Collaborative Business Planning), considered a “Utopian dream”. Why? CBP enables Finance departments and Financial Planning and Analysis professionals to lead the planning process, but collaborate closely with all line of business planners. Is it really Utopia? The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, The Hackett Group: “In today’s economy, the most important resource is no longer labor, capital or land; it is knowledge” (Peter Drucker). Yuval Atsmon, Globality: “Comparison is the thief of joy” (Theodore Roosevelt). Pras Chatterjee, SAP: “The greatest accomplishment is not in never failing, but in rising again after you fail” (Vince Lombardi). Join us for Collaborative Business Planning: CFO Utopia?
The buzz: “Tax technology is emerging as one of the most important enablers of effective tax department design and delivery” (kpmg.com). What’s keeping your company’s Tax office awake at night? Global and US tax reform, transfer pricing regulation changes, reinvigorated tariff regimes, changes in VAT and GST regulatory reporting requirements – requiring deeper digital tax management proficiency than ever before. How to get a good night’s rest? The Tax office needs to catch-up on key technologies – machine learning and intelligent reporting tools – and fast. The experts speak. Chris Carlstead, Thomson Reuters: “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again” (Graeme Wood). Jan De Clercq, Deloitte: “The best way to predict the future is to create it” (Alan Kay). Nick Goffi, SAP: “Oh, ok. If we hire Cirque de Soleil as salaried employees, will that help us with year-end tax stuff?” (Michael Scott, The Office). Join us for Tax: The New MVP in Finance!
The buzz: “Financial shared services have come a long way since they started gaining popularity in the 1990s” (Jim Buchanan). Finance efficiencies and transparency are crucial for distributed enterprises today. How to design more intelligent Finance processes? Standardize processes throughout the organization, centralize at a few locations and build a foundation for new technologies. The experts speak. Arjun Krishnamurthy, Deloitte: “I think frugality drives innovation” (Jeff Bezos). Werner Zeitlberger, The Hackett Group: “If the rate of change on the outside of an institution exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near” (Jack Welch). Oliver Schoenborn, SAP: “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West…” (Hunter S. Thompson). Robin Bau, SAP: “Before we work on artificial intelligence, why don’t we do something about natural stupidity” (Steve Polyak). Join us for The Heart of Intelligent Finance: Share and Share Alike?
The buzz: “Finance in a digital world: It’s crunch time for CFOs!” (www2.deloitte.com). CFOs: As your organization begins finance transformation, what to do first? It depends on whom you ask. Your board says to cut headcount. Software vendors lead with technology. Advisory firms focus on processes. Reality check: Each leg of this “Golden Triangle” – People, Process, Technology – contributes to an effective transformation. The experts speak. David Dixon, TruQua: “If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing” (W. E. Deming). Molly Boyle, BlackLine: “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better” (S. Jobs). Stephanie Hudson Miller, SAP: “The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks” (M. Zuckerberg). Join us for The Golden Triangle: Digitally Transforming Finance.
The buzz: “As the CFO, you're the go-to source for accurate information about company performance—no excuses, no delays.” (Bright Talk webinar) Finance organizations have changed dramatically, shifting from looking backwards for financial statements, to helping define the company’s strategic direction via forward-looking insights. Oxford Economics found today’s successful CFOs collaborating with business counterparts on the operational side, and taking a greater role in identifying risks: financial, supply chain, marketing, talent management. How? State-of-the-art technology including machine learning. The experts speak. Brian Kalish, Kalish Consulting: “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking” (Malcolm X). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “The human spirit must prevail over technology” (Albert Einstein). Kevin McCollom, SAP: “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast” (Tom Peters). Join us for Finance Leadership: Ready to Be a Tech-Savvy CFO?
The buzz: “Disruptive technologies…will be used in the office of the CFO to increase productivity, simplify processes, and support decision-making” (Thomas Zipperle). Attention CFOs: Your Finance department can become a “smart” steward to drive fiscal and operational decisions for your business. How? By using real-time data access, next generation visualization, AI, Machine Learning and other modern technologies. But to be truly “intelligent”, Finance must enable collaboration, not just discussion, to link plans across the business. The experts speak. Julien Delvat, TruQua: “I do not believe you can do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow” (Horatio Nelson Jackson). Thiagu Bala, Deloitte: “The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance” (Nathaniel Branden). Rob Jenkins, SAP: “We should seek the greatest value of our action” (Stephen Hawking). Join us for The Secret to Intelligent Finance Planning: Collaboration.
The buzz: “Working capital optimization is increasingly on boards’ radar as they look for opportunities to enhance shareholder value” (Rich Rorem). Responsibility for managing inventory, payables, receivables, and cash is spread unevenly across finance, operations, supply chain, marketing and sales, procurement. Your CFO needs to think holistically about working capital optimization across the full value chain to make it part of the organization’s daily operations. How? Automation and artificial intelligence enable the CFO to guide all operational units. The experts speak. Gerhard Urbasch, The Hackett Group: “I wish human beings were as transparent as a jellyfish so we could identify the source of their pains” (Wilhelm C. Röntgen). Denise McGuigan, Deloitte: “The best way to predict the future is to create it” (P. Drucker). Andy Baxter, SAP: “When you are finished changing, you’re finished” (Ben Franklin). Join us for Optimizing Working Capital: Cashing-In for Your Bottom Line.
The buzz: “Finance professionals are spending just 17% of their time on strategic activities, with a lack of automation serving as the culprit for much of this inefficiency (Henner Schliebs). As the role of Finance changes to strategic advisor to the business, it’s critical to increase day-to-day process efficiency. How? Re-imagine Finance with Intelligent ERP that uses machine learning, in-memory technology and simplified data structures. The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, The Hackett Group: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek” (Pres. Barack Obama). Prof. Dr. Karin Graeslund, RheinMain University of Applied Sciences: “The magic always results from the details” (Theodor Fontane). Matthias Haendly, SAP: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them” (Ernest Hemingway). Join us for Machine Learning and Finance: Process Automation to the Next Level.
The buzz: “We are all ‘data subjects’ and we live in a world where key aspects of our lives will be ever more determined by the data held about us…where that same data is more at risk and open to compromise than ever” (GDPR – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, Tripwire). GDPR takes effect on May 25, 2018, requiring organizations to safeguard the personal data they're handling of European Union citizens and residents – whether or not the company is operating on the continent. Non-compliance will incur steep fines. It's almost time. Need help? The experts speak. Jeff Sanchez, Protiviti: “Every single day, Every word you say, Every game you play, Every night you stay, I'll be watching you” (The Police). Nadine Mueller, EY: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (Animal Farm). Dr. Neil Patrick, SAP: “They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you're having them” (A.A. Milne). Join us for GDPR Is Coming: Coping Strategies to Get Ready.
The buzz: “As the CFO, you're the go-to source for accurate information about company performance—no excuses, no delays.” (Bright Talk webinar) Finance organizations have changed dramatically, shifting from looking backwards for financial statements, to helping define the company’s strategic direction via forward-looking insights. Oxford Economics found today’s successful CFOs collaborating with business counterparts on the operational side, and taking a greater role in identifying risks: financial, supply chain, marketing, talent management. How? State-of-the-art technology including machine learning. The experts speak. Brian Kalish, Kalish Consulting: “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking” (Malcolm X). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “The human spirit must prevail over technology” (Albert Einstein). Kevin McCollom, SAP: “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast” (Tom Peters). Join us for Finance Leadership: Ready to Be a Tech-Savvy CFO?
The buzz: “Unfortunately, financial information is a decaying asset. The longer it takes to prepare the statements the less valuable the information becomes” (Steve Rosvold). Financial reports are required to meet statutory and management mandates. Traditional “hard close” reports could only be produced after the end of the period. Good news: Technology now lets your Finance department run a financial consolidation on real-time transactional data. Or maybe it’s not good news. Our panel will debate the value of mid-month reporting. The experts speak. Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking” (“Blink”, Malcolm Gladwell). Sam Parikh, Deloitte: “To innovate does not necessarily mean to expand; very often it means to simplify” (M. Russell Ballard). Stephanie Hudson Miller, SAP: “If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?” (Vince Lombardi). Join us for Real-time Close: Oxymoron or True Value?
The buzz: “Predicting better than pure guesswork, even if not accurately, delivers real value” (Eric Siegel). The lines are blurring between the traditionally silo’ed Financial Planning and Analysis department and the Finance team that performs Financial Consolidation. Why? Technology is enabling a more accurate middle-of-the-month predictive close to replace month-over-month planning and forecasting. How can your company leverage innovations for more granualte forecasting and guidance for the business? The experts speak. David Dixon, TruQua Enterprises: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” (Wayne Gretzky). Tony Guetersloh, TruQua Enterprises: “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time” (The Beatles). Elizabeth Milne, SAP: “Sometimes the light’s all shining on me, other times I can barely see” (The Grateful Dead). Join us for Predictive Close and Predictive Accounting: Getting Granular.
The buzz: “In the few years since I began using analytics, the view that it might be ‘just a fad’ has shifted to a growing understanding of its potential” (Frank Friedman, Deloitte CEO / former CFO). Digital Transformation is flooding the Office of the CFO with information and data sources, and instant actuals replace periodic. How can your CFO harness the data deluge, adopt Dynamic Planning, and guide the business beyond numbers? The answer: Analytics, BI and Visualization. The experts speak. Rob Jenkins, SAP: “All models are wrong, but some are useful” (George E. P. Box). Patrick Hickey, Jump Analytics: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” (Beckett on Wawrinka). David Den Boer, Column5 Consulting: “It sounds logical to ask customers what they want and then give it to them. But they rarely wind up getting what they really want that way” (Steve Jobs). Join us for Visualization, BI and Advanced Analytics: Improving Enterprise Financial Performance.
The buzz: “CFOs need to be able to evaluate and prepare for the impact political, economic and societal events may have on their organization…take on a more strategic role in planning” (Thack Brown, SAP). Yes. It’s time for the Office of Finance function to morph from scheduled guidance based on past results to a trusted business guide into the future. How? Digital transformation now gives CFOs instant access to a real-time snapshot of fiscal health and enables them to help business leaders understand how to use immediate access to financial data. Is your CFO there yet? The experts speak. Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” (Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower). Brian Kalish, Kalish Consulting: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic” (Arthur C. Clarke). Thiagu Bala, Deloitte: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right (Henry Ford). Join us for Dynamic and Agile Planning: The Impact of Real Time Actuals.
The buzz: Three’s a charm. The Three Lines of Defense (TLoD) is becoming a globally recognized framework, where Corporate Risk, Compliance and other groups set standards and practices for managing risk and Internal Audit provides assurance. In research commissioned by SAP from Forrester, ~45% of 200+ respondents had implemented or were implementing TLoD, but some executives had significant ongoing concerns. Is implementation only at the fringes of the business? Is deep, rigorous implementation missing? The experts speak. Mark Salamasick, University of Texas System: “Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands” (Clint Eastwood). Elvia Novak Deloitte: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success” (Henry Ford). Bruce McCuaig, SAP: “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity” (Amelia Earhart). Join us for Three Lines of Defense: Fact or Fiction?
The buzz: No more green eyeshade! Finance departments typically had to wait until period-end – month, quarter, year – for data-compilation-intensive financial reports .Strategic business decisions had to rely on a rear-view mirror. Now technology allows companies from start-ups to huge enterprises to integrate closing tasks, processes and systems with core ERP and accounting environments for a business snapshot at any time. Is your company ready to see the light? The experts speak. Robert D. Kugel, Ventana Research: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools—especially our accounting concepts and data—all focus on efficiency” (Peter Drucker). Suzanne Roelofs, EY: “I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven’t done” (Lucille Ball). Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “Do… or do not. There is no try” (Yoda, Star Wars V).Join us for Continuous Accounting: An End to Rear-View Reporting.
The buzz: Risky business. As your business goes digital, you face a dual challenge: keep everything humming while protecting your company from compliance breaches, anomalies in transactions, and other risk exposure from your customers, suppliers and partners. Will tech tools like machine learning and predictive analytics help accomplish this in real time? The experts speak. Carlos Russell, Ternium: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself” (Groucho Marx). Stefan Schaffer, EY: “The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed” (William Gibson). Chris McClean, Forrester: “Globalization…has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life” (Robert Wright). Jérôme Pugnet, SAP: “Rogues are always found out…Whoever is a wolf will act as a wolf…” (Jean de La Fontaine). Join us for Fraud, 3rd Party Risk, and Live Business.
The buzz: Net-net. Brace yourself for news! By 2015, Millennials were the largest generational cohort in the US workforce. And their characteristic work style – caring deeply about workplace satisfaction, social networking, BYOD and mobile – has changed many areas of business, including the historically new-trend-and-technology-averse finance department. As a result, all financial professionals worldwide are now seeing their role and job within the corporate enterprise differently. The experts speak. John Arellano, Deloitte: “Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan” (Margaret Thatcher). Celina Rogers, CFO Publishing: “Some people only ask others to do something. I believe that, why should I wait for someone else? Why don’t I take a step and move forward?” (Malala Yousafzai). Henner Schliebs, SAP: “All generalizations are dangerous, even this one” (Alexandre Dumas, fils). Join us for Millennials and Your Finance Organization: Work Style And Business.
The buzz: Everybody’s talking. I can’t hear a word they’re saying…. It’s no secret that Finance typically lags in new technology adoption. Or that this leaves most Finance professionals – likely yours, too – ill-equipped to drive real-time and in-depth analysis and insightful reporting on key business metrics and priorities. Reality check: Global markets are harsher. Wall Street is less kind. Finance needs to be able to help your company forecast, plan and predict successful outcomes. But how? Arm your Finance team with the right technology tools to be at the core of driving your organization’s digital transformation. The experts speak. Sam Parikh, Deloitte: “The task of the leader is to get his (her) people from where they are to where they have not been” (Henry Kissinger). Jon Essig, SimpleFi: “Change before you have to” (Jack Welch). Karuna Mukherjea, SAP: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” (Alan Kay). Join us for The Future of Finance: Powered by Technology.
The buzz: Net-net. Brace yourself for news! By 2015, Millennials were the largest generational cohort in the US workforce. And their characteristic work style – caring deeply about workplace satisfaction, social networking, BYOD and mobile – has changed many areas of business, including the historically new-trend-and-technology-averse finance department. As a result, all financial professionals worldwide are now seeing their role and job within the corporate enterprise differently. The experts speak. John Arellano, Deloitte: “Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan” (Margaret Thatcher). Celina Rogers, CFO Publishing: “Some people only ask others to do something. I believe that, why should I wait for someone else? Why don’t I take a step and move forward?” (Malala Yousafzai). Henner Schliebs, SAP: “All generalizations are dangerous, even this one” (Alexandre Dumas, fils). Join us for Millennials and Your Finance Organization: Work Style And Business.
The buzz: I can see clearly now. In its long-time role as steward of the enterprise, Finance could only make recommendations to the business after month-end, based on past results. But with technology now providing real-time insights into finance and operations, the office of the CFO can look ahead and guide its constituents to navigate a true course through any economic climate. How? Finance can focus on interpretation and predictive analysis to help the company focus on strategic goals. The experts speak. Nilly Essaides, Association for Financial Professionals: “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together” (Vincent Van Gogh). Shin Sawhney, Capgemini UK: “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things” (Peter Drucker). David Ormerod, SAP: “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining” (John F. Kennedy). Join us for Real-Time Insights: Driving Finance Transformation.
The buzz: The heat is on. Your company is under pressure to improve transparency, intimacy and trust with internal and external stakeholders. Your business has to be digitally “on” all the time. Your CFO needs to command a more strategic role in the business. How? Streamline finance operations and partner interactions by centralizing Finance Shared Services across your enterprise. Prizes include enhanced productivity, new service level support, reduced collaboration time, higher quality automated processing. What role does technology play in all of this? The experts speak. Andrzej Hutniczak, Capgemini: “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get (Warren Buffett). Christopher Juneau, Concur: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards (Steve Jobs). Martin Naraschewski, SAP: “We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain” (Stephen Hawking). Join us for Streamlining Your Finance Operations: The Experts Speak.
The buzz: Faster! s digitalization, advanced analytical capabilities and other technologies disrupt the business world, the finance profession must change. Senior finance execs are seeking sophisticated information tools to support new demands on their role. How can they capitalize on innovations to deliver the highest value to the business? The experts speak. Srikanth Tamma, Deloitte: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have…It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it” (Steve Jobs). Nick Castellina, Aberdeen: “An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage” (Jack Welch). Neil Krefsky, SAP: “What turns me on about the digital age...you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing ..to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop” (Bono). Join us for Behold the Digital Finance Professional: Adapting at Lightning Speed.
The buzz: Perfect vision? The Finance function in most organizations has traditionally focused on the past, through expense control, spreadsheet-driven accounting and management reporting. Fast forward to the imminent, full adoption of digital technologies. With changes to your finance operating model, technology and people, your Finance 2020 organization can become a predictive analytics powerhouse and go-to decision support source for the business. Some analysts say digital may kill finance. Is that a good or a bad thing? The expert speak. David Axson, Accenture: “The end result of great forecasting is not an accurate picture of tomorrow, but better decisions about the future” (Peter Schwartz). Bo Lykkegaard, IDC: “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading” (Lao Tzu). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones” (John Maynard Keynes). Join us for Finance in 2020: How Much Transformation?
The buzz: IA. Technology innovations are giving your Internal Audit (IA) team a real opportunity to shift from its traditional role as a deliverer of assurance and protector of existing value to a new role of trusted advisor. With its corporate level positioning and cross-functional role, IA may also be in the running to play a lead role in identifying and helping to manage risk – perhaps as your company’s command center for risk. Is there more ahead for IA? And how should you measure its expanded value? The experts speak. Paul Sobel, Georgia-Pacific: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” (George Bernard Shaw). Carey Oven, Deloitte: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed” (Theodore Roosevelt). Bruce McCuaig, SAP: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” (Henry Ford). Join us for Internal Audit at a Turning Point: Command Center for Risk?
The buzz: Sizzle vs Steak. Many CFOs’ wish lists include improved collaboration, embedded analytics, easier deployment and streamlined maintenance. As a result, Cloud-based EPM solutions will appeal to current and new users of performance management solutions. But what will EPM in the Cloud really offer to organizations? How does it differ from traditional on-premise approaches? And as we observe the rise of the Analytical CFO”, does EPM fit? The experts speak. Joe Mastro, Deloitte: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not…Education will not…Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent” (Calvin Coolidge). Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics” (Benjamin Disraeli). David Williams, SAP: “First mover isn't what's important — it's the last mover” (Peter Thiel). Join us for Re-Imagining EPM Part 2: Working in the Cloud.
The buzz: Onward! Take a good look around your finance and accounting offices. Does it feel like your finance team is on the cutting edge of innovation and leading the charge to add strategic value to the business? Or do you see endless piles of paperwork, and hear grumblings about deadlines, information requests and other typical back office headaches? If the latter, it’s time to learn how to leverage data, benchmarking and metrics to modernize your finance function. But where and how do you start? The experts speak. Eric Merrill, Deloitte: “All great changes are preceded by chaos” (Deepak Chopra). Mark Richards, RBA Consulting: “Financials are like the punchline to a joke and the set-up is in the operations.” Dan Fagan, SAP: Vince Lombardi said, “If you’re not keeping score you’re just practicing.” Cate Costa gave us the modern-day version, “There are no participation trophies in business.” Join us for Modernizing Your Finance Organization: Metrics and Benchmarking.
The buzz: Salud! The integration between Finance and Operations has evolved from time-lagging batch processes to now real-time information. Since operational information ultimately impacts both your revenue and cost planning, changes across your entire value chain must be reflected in finance. Savvy CFOs now see their functional scope widening from core accounting to include catalyst and strategist roles. And digitally mature organizations are enjoying up to a 26% increase in profitability. It’s all good. The experts speak. Alex Bannell, Capgemini: “So what?” Eric Bramley, Deloitte: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity” (General George S. Patton, Jr.). Rich Sernyak, PwC: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful” (John Maeda). Martin Mrugal, SAP: “Zero Latency is the future currency for competitive advantage.” Join us for Finance and Operations Integration: To Your Business Health!
The buzz: At risk. Recent research and surveys suggest that enterprise boards of directors and CEOs want, need, and are demanding more and better information on enterprise risk management from the CFO and Office of Finance. It’s becoming so urgent that some boards are starting to exercise an oversight role. Reality check: A serious gap persists between what the CFO is delivering and what the business requires. Could this put CFOs at risk, too? The experts speak. Elvia Novak, Deloitte: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go” (T.S. Eliot). Bruce McCuaig, SAP: “Getting the right thing wrong is better than putting the wrong thing right … Most of our current problems are the result of policy makers and managers busting a gut to do the wrong thing right...” (Russell Ackoff). Join us for Board to CFO: Need Better Risk Management Data NOW!
The buzz: Change With budgeting and forecasting silos popping up across business, your CFO and Office of Finance have a more important role than ever before: moving from basic support cost center to a proactive revenue driver and business partner. Their goal should now be to lead the organization forward with real-time interpretation of data to help navigate today’s and tomorrow’s competitive business climate. Change happens over time. The best results are achieved when it’s intentional. The experts speak. Greg Wright, VantagePoint Business Solutions: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” (Albert Einstein). Ingmar Christiaens, EY: “Knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand...Imagination embraces…all there ever will be to know and understand” (Albert Einstein). Floyd Conrad, SAP: “It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all” (Henri Poincare). Join us for CFO-Led Revolution: Integrated Business Planning.
The buzz: Your CFO With the pace of business accelerating, you need your CFO to be a proactive high-performer, not a perpetually-catching-up laggard. The high performer leverages innovative technologies and processes to strategically guide the organization’s sales and investment decisions toward profitable growth. They analyze, monitor and share performance results in real-time. The passive CFO, not so much or at all. If yours is the latter, how can you empower them? The experts speak. William Fuessler, IBM: “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside” (John F. Kennedy). Nick Castellina, Aberdeen: “An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage” (Jack Welch). Neil Krefsky, SAP: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” (Wayne Gretzky). Join us to learn How High-Performing CFOs Add Business Value.
The buzz: Change. Managing the roles and functions of Finance can be challenging, from compliance complexities and managing cash, to closing the books and building business plans, while contending with economic, regulatory and competitive forces and internal customers. Software vendors are trying to help Finance run more efficiently and cope with constant change. The experts speak. Rob Kugel, Ventana: “Never ask of money spent, where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant, to remember or invent, what he did with every cent.” (Robert Frost). Renee Ford, Accenture: “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” (Bill Gates). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.” (Shanna LaFleur). Join us for Innovating for the New Finance Organization.
The buzz: Three. Your company may have already implemented, at least partially, a Three Lines of Defense model. But when faced with technological challenges such as getting the most effective tools, or integrating different systems, the process can be time-consuming and reactive rather than optimized and proactive. Key questions you may ask: How can risk management activities coalesce into a cohesive assurance program within the wider system of internal control? How can you leverage technology to establish a Three Lines of Defense model that delivers sound assurance supported by continuous auditing? The experts speak. Ganesh Ram, PwC: “Do. Or do not. There is no try” (Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back) Kevin D. Heckel, Deloitte: “Managing the risks we face today requires layer solutions including security, vigilance and resiliency.” Jérôme Pugnet, SAP: “the term ‘Three Lines of Defense’ appears to come from medical research.” Join us for Three Lines of Defense: Can Technology Help?
The buzz: Rev Rec. Revenue recognition is the single most important item on your company’s financial statement and to your organization. The IASB and FASB already announced new converged revenue accounting standards – but they may be delayed a year. If you haven't started planning for the impact, what should your next steps be? If you have started, should you adjust for the delay? And have you read all 700 pages of new rules? The experts speak. Chris Smith, PwC: “It's just an accounting change, how hard could that possibly be?!” Julie Zielke, EY: “This quite possibly will be one of the most transformative accounting pronouncements of our time.” David Furgason, Deloitte: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” (Maya Angelou) Pete Graham, SAP: “A good plan executed today is better than the perfect plan executed tomorrow.” (George S. Patton) Join us for New Revenue Recognition: Here Yet?
Today’s buzz: Profitability. Despite sophisticated business intelligence tools that enable analysis of Big Data, and the renewed popularity of profitability and costing analysis, many companies still can’t get a grip on fundamental planning inefficiencies or rebound from recent economic instability. If you’re among them, it’s time for your finance organization to rethink their approach to data and their role in the business. Bottom line: Who should own profitability and the best practices to build a more profitable future? The experts speak.
Gary Cokins, Analytics-Based Performance Management: “There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” (da Vinci).
Jon Essig, CPA, Optimal Solutions: “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so” (Galileo).
Rob Jenkins, SAP: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” (Niels Bohr).
Join us for Predicting Profitable Performance in Challenging Times.
The buzz: Zoom! Marathons. Formula One. Internet downloads. Streaming video. In scenarios like these, we intuitively know faster is always better. But for Finance, how important are true real-time processes – or is “near-real-time” fast enough? To help you find the answer, we’ll explore which processes can benefit from real-time information, what your Finance team can do with real-time in-memory technology not possible in the past, and the benefits of having true real-time information at your fingertips. The experts speak. Celina Rogers, CFO Publishing: “The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning” (Nicholas Carr). Tony Rogan, Accenture: “Some are born to sweet delight; some are born to endless night” (William Blake). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” (Albert Einstein). Join us for Your Finance Processes in Real-Time: How Fast Is Fast Enough?
The buzz: The CFO. The concept of the strategic CFO – responsible for more than just numbers – is not new. But now there's a new technology-driven dynamic in Finance, a nexus of powerful forces driven by in-memory, cloud, mobile, and social. It's not only changing how CFOs can operate, it also gives them the potential to re-imagine the processes underpinning the Finance function, as well as their role as information steward and advisor to the business. How exactly is this impacting the way CFOs are evolving the Finance function and their role within the business? The experts speak. John Steele, Deloitte: “Finance is either the center of the universe or the bottom of the hill – either way all roads lead there.” David Dixon, TruQua: “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine” (Peter Sondergaard). Henner Schliebs, SAP: “He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander” (Aristotle). Join us for The Strategic CFO: Re-Imagining Finance.
The buzz: Payments. As the daily drumbeat of the news spotlights retail credit card breaches and other payment problems, it’s clear that the payment industry is ripe for change. Innovations like Square, Google Wallet, and ApplePay are attempting to disrupt the consumer payments market. And B2B payments, notoriously stuck in the past, are also seeing game-changing progress. The experts speak. Gloria Colgan, Market Platform Dynamics: “Rome wasn't built in a day.” (French circa 1190, English circa 1538) Matt Johanson, Discover Network: “Innovation is not a new topic. What’s different now: the key areas have reached tipping points creating an environment in which truly innovative solutions can start to become reality.” Drew Hofler, SAP: “The most recent US innovation that fundamentally changed the way payments are made between businesses, and the one that still accounts for only about 40% of those payments, was introduced the same year as the Betamax video tape!” They will be joined by Matt Johanson, Discover Network. Join us for a thought leadership roundtable on Burning Platforms and Innovations in Consumer and B2B Payments.
The buzz: Fraud. As hard as you work to implement effective anti-fraud processes, voracious and savvy fraudsters are working even harder, and perhaps smarter, to thwart you. Good news! Predictive analytics technology can help you understand emerging fraud patterns and adapt against new types of attack, but only if you use the tools effectively. What will it take for your leadership to make this a priority? The experts speak. Derek Snaidauf, Deloitte: “The beginning is the most important part of the work” (Plato). Michael P Cangemi, Cangemi Company: “The uninspected (inevitably) deteriorates” (34th US President Dwight D. Eisenhower). Jérôme Pugnet, SAP: “Fraudulent actors often exhibit repetitive patterns. As we recognize these, we can apply heuristics to predict when they are about to occur again, and help stop them; but for complex, evolving fraud vectors, we turn to machine learning…” (Blog at Airbnb). Join us for Fighting Fraud: Predictive Technology to the Rescue? – Part 3.
The buzz: Revenue recognition. Revenue is the single-most important item on your company’s financial statement. Now that the IASB and FASB have announced their converged revenue accounting standards, it’s time to prepare for new requirements. It’s not a matter of whether these new will impact you, as well as organizations across the world and across industries. It’s a matter of how much. What can you do to prepare? Have you read the entire 700 pages about the new rules? The experts speak. David Furgason, Deloitte Consulting: “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them” (Maya Angelou). John McGaw, EY: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit” (Ronald Reagan). Pete Graham, SAP: “Watch the pennies, and the dollars take care of themselves” (Benjamin Franklin). Join us for New Revenue Recognition Standard: Now What?
The buzz: Risk. Critical questions are raised by recent IA research and surveys of internal auditors seeming to suggest strong support for involving Internal Audit in enterprise risk management. Are IA practices really changing and departments transitioning to provide risk management advice and opinions to the business? Are Boards and senior execs actually asking for this? Perhaps most important, are any conflicts inherent in such a new role for IA? The experts speak. Robert D. Gould, Internal Audit, Harley-Davidson: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” (Mark Twain). Thomas Bamberger, Chief Audit Executive, SAP: “Information exchange between Risk Management, Compliance and Audit is key for full transparency.” Bruce McCuaig, Governance Risk and Compliance Solutions, SAP: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” (Arthur Ashe). Join us for Internal Audit: New Role in Enterprise Risk Management?
The buzz: Now! If true real-time” access to information is necessary for your Finance organization to be effective, they need to leverage in-memory technology for day-to-day and period-end processes. The benefits – instant insight to improve financial performance reporting and to predict the financial outcome of business decisions – can position Finance as a true strategic partner to the business. Are you there yet? The experts speak. Celina Rogers, CFO Publishing: “Computer people still are concerned with greater speed and bigger memories. But the challenges increasingly will be not technical, but to convert data into usable information that is actually being used” (Peter Drucker). John Steele, Deloitte: “The future is now.” Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter” (Malcolm Gladwell). Join us for the Impact of Instant Processes and Insight on Finance.
The buzz: Mobile Finance. Mobile technology can now put a range of sophisticated analytics tools into the hands of your Finance organization to support planning, budgeting, and forecasting on-the-go. Having the agility to create and deliver timely reports on a mobile device sounds exciting, even sexy – right? But as with all innovations, there’s work to do before you can reap the benefits. Your executive team needs to really sponsor it, not just pay lip service. Your Finance team has to adopt, adapt, and integrate the right tools into a strong mobile strategy. And you need to train the right team of talent to optimize it. Are you there yet?
The experts speak. Nick Castellina, Aberdeen: “He who fails to plan is planning to fail” (Winston Churchill). Kaan Turnali, SAP: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (Leonardo da Vinci). Pete Graham, SAP: “Remember that time is money” Benjamin Franklin).
Join us for Mobile Finance – Are You Ready?
Today’s buzz: Bribery and Corruption The global economy brings great opportunities. And great risks. On your home court or a new playground, whether perpetrated by your staff or a third party, new flavors of bribery and corruption fraud schemes are keeping regulators, boards and executives awake at night. Can technology help them sleep? The experts speak. Vincent Walden, Ernst & Young: “Fraud is similar to fashion. Things get hot, then fade away. In the early 2000s (pre-SOX) ... financial misstatements and ‘cooking the books.’ In the mid-2000s, stock-options backdating was hot. For the last 4–5 years, it is FCPA (and insider trading)...”. Thomas Fox, attorney, independent consultant: “Your compliance program is a living entity; it should be constantly evolving”. Melissa Lea, SAP: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.” (Warren Buffett). Join us for Compliance: Focus on Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption.
The buzz: Change. Managing the roles and functions of Finance can be challenging, from compliance complexities and managing cash, to closing the books and building business plans, while contending with economic, regulatory and competitive forces and internal customers. Software vendors are trying to help Finance run more efficiently and cope with constant change. The experts speak. Rob Kugel, Ventana: “Never ask of money spent, where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant, to remember or invent, what he did with every cent.” (Robert Frost). Renee Ford, Accenture: “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” (Bill Gates). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.” (Shanna LaFleur). Join us for Innovating for the New Finance Organization.
The buzz: Planning. How healthy is your planning and budgeting process? If you’re using an heirloom Excel spreadsheet recipe with gut-feeling and short-term MBO ingredients, your CFO is surely hungering for more substance. Today, with mainstream, end-user focused tech tools, you have no excuse to NOT include modern technologies in planning and budgeting. Ready to base decisions on realistic insights instead of wishful thinking? The experts speak. Steve Player, Beyond Budgeting: “If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle the boat” (Navy Admiral W. H. McRaven). Paul Davis, NTT Data: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena” (Theodore Roosevelt). Pras Chatterjee, SAP: “Everything you can imagine is real” (Picasso). Tune in for answers to the pressing question, Predictive Planning: Fiction or Reality?
The buzz: IA. Technology innovations are giving your Internal Audit (IA) team a real opportunity to shift from its traditional role as a deliverer of assurance and protector of existing value to a new role of trusted advisor. With its corporate level positioning and cross-functional role, IA may also be in the running to play a lead role in identifying and helping to manage risk – perhaps as your company’s command center for risk. Is there more ahead for IA? And how should you measure its expanded value? The experts speak. Paul Sobel, Georgia-Pacific: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” (George Bernard Shaw). Carey Oven, Deloitte: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed” (Theodore Roosevelt). Bruce McCuaig, SAP: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” (Henry Ford). Join us for Internal Audit at a Turning Point: Command Center for Risk?
The buzz: Predictive. Today's finance organization charter is broadened, with core functional deliverables enhanced by service to most functions company-wide. There is no excuse not to use modern technology. Predictive analytics is no longer the PhD thing for specialized SAS programmers in the basement. Predictive is a must for a modern controller, accountant and treasurer, especially if you hope to meet and outperform your CFO's goals. The experts speak. Anders Reinhardt, VELUX: “A fool with a tool is still a fool” (Grady Booch). Nancy J. Jones, Educator: “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise… But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom” (Charles Spurgeon). Rob Kugel, Ventana Research: “You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there” (Yogi Berra). Henner Schliebs, SAP: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” (Niels Bohr). Join us for Predictive Analytics and Finance: Role Play
The buzz: Cloud. Finance is warming up to adopting the Cloud, to help provide strategic advice to the business, operate more efficiently, and maintain compliance. But Finance first must figure out how to balance ease of ownership, low-cost predictable subscription model, less IT dependence, with concerns about security and data integrity of critical finance information in the Cloud. When? The experts speak. Joshua Greenbaum, Enterprise Applications Consulting: “The Office of the CFO needs to be split into the Office of Financial Compliance and the Office of Financial Innovation so we can ignore the former and stop driving financial innovation based on what a regulator thinks is innovative.” David Dixon, TruQua: “Behind every cloud is another cloud” (Judy Garland). Neil Krefsky, SAP: “You are not here to shrink down to less, but to blossom into more of who you really are” (Oprah). Join us for Is Finance Ready for the Cloud?
The buzz: Change. Managing the roles and functions of Finance can be challenging, from compliance complexities and managing cash, to closing the books and building business plans, while contending with economic, regulatory and competitive forces and internal customers. Software vendors are trying to help Finance run more efficiently and cope with constant change. The experts speak. Rob Kugel, Ventana: “Never ask of money spent, where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant, to remember or invent, what he did with every cent.” (Robert Frost). Renee Ford, Accenture: “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” (Bill Gates). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.” (Shanna LaFleur). Join us for Innovating for the New Finance Organization.
Today’s buzz: Trade. As companies put in place better processes and tools to manage cross-border business transactions, they continue to face increasing multi-national legislative requirements that increase the compliance burden, but also provide an opportunity for a competitive edge. Can technology really help your company reduce complexity and accelerate international trade? The experts speak. Kevin Riddell, Tremco: “You have to be a little strange to get trade compliance.” Rajen Iyer, Krypt: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” (Theodore Roosevelt) Marcus Puschke, SAP: “Trade isn´t about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.” (C.J. Cherryh) Join us for more insights on Trends in International Trade Management.
The buzz: EPM. Innovations in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) are redefining how organizations around the globe are managing and growing their business. Technologies like Mobility, Cloud, Social and beyond are available to help you understand, react and adapt to changing market conditions, global events, and all-important customer needs, behavior and expectations. Are you ready to embrace these opportunities to become agile and do more than just survive? The experts speak. Steve Sussman, Column5: “Over half of the investments made by companies in analytics tools will be wasted, because of cultural immaturity, a lack of required skills and inappropriate training levels”(Gartner, 12/2011). Michael Svolos, TekLink: “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool” (W. Shakespeare). Karuna Mukherjea, SAP: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” (Steve Jobs). Join us for Enterprise Performance Management Innovations: New Frontiers.
You likely use at least one personal mobile device for real-time access to relevant data, from breaking news to stock performance and hyper-local traffic conditions. Can your company’s Finance function also leverage innovative technologies to be more effective and strategic? Good news: Yes! Look to in-memory technology for up-to-the-minute financial and operational data; the cloud for quick implementations; analytics and mobility for combined company and market information. And there’s more. The experts speak. Bill Sinnitt, Financial Executives Research Foundation, Inc.: “You can never have enough analytics from business intelligence.” John Steele, Deloitte: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” (Peter F. Drucker). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination” (Albert Einstein). Join us for more insights on Tech Innovations in Finance: Driving Business Results.
Business risk is a fact of life. Does the specter of product liability, cyber and physical security, fraud, theft, regulatory failure, breakdowns, and low revenues keep you awake at night? The experts speak. Paul Albert, Albert Investments: “A wise, battle-hardened senior investment banker told me: ‘We're in the business of taking risks with the objective of creating value for our shareholders while serving our clients' interests, so I don't mind taking risks. But when I take risks I want to understand what they are, why I am taking them, and how to reduce them or to get out of them.’” Nola Masterson, Science Futures Management Company: “Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” (James B. Conant) Brian Barnier, ValueBridge Advisors: “What do a winning basketball team and a company with consistently higher returns have in common? The ability to ask ‘What if?’ more insightfully than their opponents.” Join us for Board Risk Oversight: What Are Regulators Saying?
The buzz: Risk Your risk managers are being forced to prove that they are adding value to the business. At the same time, they are faced with a range of choices in how and where they implement risk management practices and which, if any, technology innovations to use to drive success. The experts speak. Saret van Loggerenberg, Exxaro Resources Limited: “Governance, Risk and Compliance is not about ticking boxes for compliance sake. Applied correctly, it is a set of interrelated business processes to ensure we create value for shareholders and the broader stakeholder community.” Scott L. Mitchell, OCEG: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” (Confucius) Bruce McCuaig, SAP: “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better!” (Ackoff) Join us for Risk Management: Driving Value by Leveraging Technology.
Today’s buzz: Profitability. Despite sophisticated business intelligence tools that enable analysis of Big Data, and the renewed popularity of profitability and costing analysis, many companies still can’t get a grip on fundamental planning inefficiencies or rebound from recent economic instability. If you’re among them, it’s time for your finance organization to rethink their approach to data and their role in the business. Bottom line: Who should own profitability and the best practices to build a more profitable future? The experts speak.
Gary Cokins, Analytics-Based Performance Management: “There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” (da Vinci).
Jon Essig, CPA, Optimal Solutions: “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so” (Galileo).
Rob Jenkins, SAP: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” (Niels Bohr).
Join us for Predicting Profitable Performance in Challenging Times.
Today’s buzz: Payment challenges. Banks and corporations are facing an increasingly complex landscape in the payments arena and the associated integration. New types of payments and currency, new technology tools, new security threats and security techniques, and new challengers to traditional providers all contribute to the immense change. The world of payments is now driven by risk, cost, and the ability to reconcile. Players have just two choices: innovate or face greater opportunities to lose big. The experts speak. Tom Durkin, Bank of America Merrill Lynch: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” (Bill Gates). Laurie McCulley, Treasury Strategies: “Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?', but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?’” (Steve Jobs). Leonard Schwartz, SAP: “Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out” (Thomas in Blow-Up, 1966 film). Join us for Managing Financial Performance: New Payment Challenges and Innovation Options.
The buzz: Fraud. As hard as your company works to put in place effective anti-fraud processes and tools, fraudsters are working harder to circumvent whatever you try. Take heart! Predictive analytics technology may be able to help you understand emerging fraud patterns and adapt strategies against new types of attack. The experts speak. Derek Snaidauf, Deloitte: “By some estimates, the typical organization loses 5% of its revenues to fraud each year, which translates to a potential projected global fraud loss of more than $3.5 trillion. Fraud perpetrators are sophisticated, well organized, and adaptive—as soon as one scheme is detected, another one materializes.” Michael P. Cangemi, Cangemi Company: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” (Albert Einstein). Jérôme Pugnet, SAP: “People always tend to see gangsters as stocky dark-haired guys. It’s the silliest prejudice.” (Antoine Beretto, “Ne nous fachons pas!”). Join us for Fighting Fraud: Predictive Technology to the Rescue?
Closing the books and creating financial reports are nothing new. But with the accelerating pace of business, Finance now must deliver faster, more reliable and visible results, all with full regulatory compliance. Is this keeping your CFO awake at night? The experts speak. Wendy Reinitz, Performance Analytics: “There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there. (Indira Gandhi). Gabe Zubizarreta, Silicon Valley Accountants: “According to Peter Drucker, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” but I add that if you can’t see it or measure it, then you can’t manage it!” Elizabeth Milne, SAP: “A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.” (Stephen Covey). Join us for Financial Closing and Reporting: Keeping Up with Change.
You likely use at least one personal mobile device for real-time access to relevant data, from breaking news to stock performance and hyper-local traffic conditions. Can your company’s Finance function also leverage innovative technologies to be more effective and strategic? Good news: Yes! Look to in-memory technology for up-to-the-minute financial and operational data; the cloud for quick implementations; analytics and mobility for combined company and market information. And there’s more. The experts speak. Bill Sinnitt, Financial Executives Research Foundation, Inc.: “You can never have enough analytics from business intelligence.” John Steele, Deloitte: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” (Peter F. Drucker). Birgit Starmanns, SAP: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination” (Albert Einstein). Join us for more insights on Tech Innovations in Finance: Driving Business Results.
The role of Internal Audit is changing. It has to. Why? Stakeholders are challenging Internal Audit to up its game. Boards want better assurance. Management expects clearer insight. How – and how quickly – can technology and automation help the Internal Audit function meet all of these demands and ultimately shift its role from “compliance police” to valued “strategic advisor”? The experts speak. Malte Globig, Flint Group: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please” (Mark Twain). Michael O’Leary, E&Y: “Keep growing everyday as a person and professional. Always recognize opportunities to learn and expand your horizons and be open to innovation.” Bruce Carpenter, SAP: “There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction” (Franz Kafka). Join us for Internal Audit of the Future: Is the Best Yet to Come?
The buzz: Integrated planning. To be optimally effective, budgeting and forecasting require understanding your business today and being able to predict tomorrow. How? In an ideal world, your CFO and CIO will make this happen by seamlessly cooperating on Integrated Business Planning across the organization. Are they there yet? Will disruptive technologies like mobility, cloud, and in-memory databases help or hinder their relationship? The experts speak. Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking” (Albert Einstein). Steve Player, Beyond Budgeting: “To make the future happen … One has to be willing to ask: What do we really want to see happen that is quite different from today? ...” (Peter Drucker). Floyd Conrad, SAP: “It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all” (Henri Poincare). Join us for Integrated Business Planning: Will Disruptive Tech Help or Hinder?
The buzz: Financial transformation. Today’s CFO’s and finance organizations are expected to take a more strategic role than ever before in supporting the business, to drive value. Transformation needs to look holistically at the finance function. How? Leveraging technology and analytics, and focusing on high value activities, can help them become more effective business leaders and achieve excellence. What will this process look like in the future? The experts speak. Richard Sernyak, PwC: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts” (Albert Einstein). Kyleen Wissell, The Coca-Cola Company: “Remain constructively discontent” (Muhtar Kent, CEO, The Coca-Cola Company). Elena Shishkina, SAP: “Do your best, worst will eventually come.” Translation from the Russian saying that one should always strive for excellence to achieve the best outcome.” (Elena’s father). Join us for Financial Transformation 2020: Can you see clearly yet?
Today’s buzz: Finance transformation. In the past 12 weeks, we’ve covered game-changing approaches to finance transformation for companies of all sizes, industries, footprints and maturity levels. Today we’ll review the valuable lessons learned and how your company can embrace innovative technologies and strategies to achieve your own financial excellence goals. Hear our expert panel’s insights and predictions around GRC (risk management, board risk oversight, role of internal audit in driving risk programs, and integrating governance, risk and compliance activities); EPM ( business innovations and transformations, strategic execution, evolution of business planning, efficiency in financial disclosures); and Finance (mobility and shared services). Join us for Financial Excellence Roundup: Lessons Learned and Onward!
Today’s buzz: Annual reporting. Reality check: the scope of annual reporting disclosures is growing every year ... not just the financial part, but also the non-financials. If your organization doesn’t have the right people, processes, technology, and best practices in place to conquer these intensifying challenges, how can you expect to cross the annual reporting finish line with your collective sanity intact? The experts speak. Jon Church, cundus: “If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.” (Mario Andretti) Mike Willis, PwC: “Standardization of the business reporting supply chain is transforming / enhancing processes, controls, capabilities for all market participants.” Thorsten Jopp, SAP: “Disclosure management is far more than creating and publishing financial reports; it is effective communication – to internals and externals.” Join us for The Last Mile of Reporting: Staying in Control.
Today’s buzz: GRC (governance, risk and compliance) integration. Is your organization suffering from “GRC pain syndrome”? According to practitioners in the know, the most prevalent symptoms include nagging-audit fatigue, effort-duplication frustration, piecemeal-GRC depression, and compliance-silo isolation. If you’re dreaming of a cure, take heart. The experts speak. Elizabeth McNichol, PwC: “But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.” (Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead) Tim Sheehy, Coca-Cola: “Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” (John C. Maxwell, the World’s Top Leadership Guru) Heike Fiedler-Phelps, SAP: “Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.” (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin) Join us for Integrated GRC: Dream vs. Reality?
Today’s buzz: Predictive analytics. How did IBM’s Watson computer best Mensa people on TV’s Jeopardy and Obama’s 2012 campaign influence voters? How does Target know your family size and Match.com pick your next mate? If you were that smart, think what you could do for your company’s bottom line! The experts speak. John Elder, Elder Research: “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) Greta Roberts, Talent Analytics: “In 1995, a 28-year-old rogue trader lost $1.4 billion dollars and killed 230- year-old Barings Bank.” Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics World: “Predicting human behavior combats financial risk, fortifies healthcare, conquers spam, toughens crime fighting, and boosts sales.” Henner Schliebs, SAP: “Finance has to deliver on the new normal: top and bottom line support through finance analytics.”
Join us for The New CFO Agenda 3.0: Tying Predictive to Financial Performance.
If you believe strategy and planning are the same, think again. And if your CFO and CIO are not on good speaking terms, your organization’s efforts at achieving truly integrated business planning may become a daunting challenge. Why? Planning is evolving to be more about people and process than about technology. The experts speak. Jeff Hattendorf, Macrospect: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” (Benjamin Disraeli) Nat D’Ercole, Deloitte: “The only limits are, as always, those of vision.” (James Broughton) David Dixon, TruQua Enterprises, author/ speaker: “You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.” (Yogi Berra) Floyd Conrad, SAP: “Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.” (Jack Welch)
Join us for more insights on Business Planning: How Far Have You Evolved?
Today’s buzz: Bribery and Corruption The global economy brings great opportunities. And great risks. On your home court or a new playground, whether perpetrated by your staff or a third party, new flavors of bribery and corruption fraud schemes are keeping regulators, boards and executives awake at night. Can technology help them sleep? The experts speak. Vincent Walden, Ernst & Young: “Fraud is similar to fashion. Things get hot, then fade away. In the early 2000s (pre-SOX) ... financial misstatements and ‘cooking the books.’ In the mid-2000s, stock-options backdating was hot. For the last 4–5 years, it is FCPA (and insider trading)...”. Thomas Fox, attorney, independent consultant: “Your compliance program is a living entity; it should be constantly evolving”. Melissa Lea, SAP: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.” (Warren Buffett). Join us for Compliance: Focus on Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption.
Today’s buzz: Internal Audit Truth time: Do your Board of Directors and Audit Committee understand the internal audit role and what your internal auditors really do? Is the Audit Committee weak or strong? If internal auditors are your heroes, are they unsung or celebrated? The experts speak. John Fraser, Hydro One Networks: “Part of what distinguishes high reliability organizations from other organizations is the extent to which they obsess about the question of what they ignore.” (Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliff, University of Michigan Business School) Renee Murphy, Forrester: “Trust is not a control, luck is not a strategy.” Norman Marks, SAP: “Internal audit has two roles: to inform the board and top management (does the organization have adequate processes for risk and compliance management?) and to persuade (help management improve those systems with both recommendations and cheerleading).” Join us for The Role of Internal Audit: GRC Police or Driver?
Today’s buzz: Strategic planning. Truth time: Is your company doing the right stuff or the dumb stuff when it comes to annual budgeting, planning and control? For example, do you measure activity or outcomes? What about a clear vision of what ‘success’ looks like, so you can gauge performance? Are stale finance practices a roadblock to your becoming a lean, agile, adaptive organization? So much to consider. Take a break and hear what the experts say. Colin Cooper, ISSEL: “What is the point of knowing how well you are performing if you don’t do anything about it? Creating reports doesn’t improve performance, strategic initiatives do. And if the two are not directly linked you are stacking the deck against yourself.” Steve Player, Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT): “Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the face.” (Mike Tyson) Tim Teinzer, SAP: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” (Peter Drucker) Join us for How to Hit a Home Run: Strategic Game Plan
Today’s buzz: Risk. Can ignorance of risk be bliss? Should risk responsibility fall on your CEO, CFO, CRO? Burning questions. You need answers. Now. The experts speak. Fiona Williams, Deloitte & Touche: “A Deloitte and Forbes Insights 2012 survey [found] ... a surprising 91% of companies plan to reorganize and reprioritize their risk management approaches in the next three years...” Scott L. Mitchell, OCEG: “We all know that even the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray (Robert Burns’ poem, ‘To a Mouse’). To execute with this expectation is much harder to do than say ... our Plans B, C, D, E, and F are as likely as Plan A when it comes to the strategic things that really matter most.” Bruce McQuaig, SAP: “A recent survey by North Carolina State ERM Initiative identified the top 10 global risks ... there is no clear evidence that risk management practices have fundamentally changed and that the past will not be repeated.” Join us for Looking for Risk in All the Wrong Places?
Today’s buzz: Finance on the move. Mobility could soon change the face of your company’s finance function. The benefits of mobile BI are indeed impressive – faster and cheaper decision-making, improved productivity, enhanced agility, perpetual forecasting, and more. But before you jump on this bandwagon, first plan the smartest route to avoid these potential bumps along the way: data security on mobile devices, device limitations, your current backend infrastructure, and opening your decision process to many more people. Hmmm. The experts speak. Surya Mukherjee, Ovum: “Mobile BI sits at the intersection of great analytics and poor consumption.” Richard Barrett, CFOKnowledge: “With sales of mobile devices booming while sales of PCs are on the slide, I’m beginning to wonder who exactly is doing the heavy lifting.” Akash Agarwal, SAP: “Be the change you want to see in the world; if you don’t change, you get disrupted.” Join us for Mobility and Finance: Impact, Trends and the Future.
Today’s buzz: Performance management. Your CFO’s priorities have to change. How? Beyond closing the books, your Office of Finance must become a steward of the business, generate new revenue from customers and markets, and much more. The challenge: how to harness your EPM data and understand it well enough to integrate fact-of-life business risk into transparent, fact-based decisions that drive business results. Are you ready to leave conventional wisdom behind? The experts speak. John Steele, Deloitte: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” – Business adage attributed to Peter F. Drucker Jim Braun, Capgemini: “Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.” – George Halas (1895-1983) aka Papa Bear and Mr. Everything, iconic leader of NFL’s Chicago Bears Kurt Bilafer, SAP: “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” – Robert H. Schuller, Hour of Power televangelist
Join us for Performance Management: Steppingstone to Predictive Analytics
Business risk is a fact of life. Does the specter of product liability, cyber and physical security, fraud, theft, regulatory failure, breakdowns, and low revenues keep you awake at night? The experts speak. Paul Albert, Albert Investments: “A wise, battle-hardened senior investment banker told me: ‘We're in the business of taking risks with the objective of creating value for our shareholders while serving our clients' interests, so I don't mind taking risks. But when I take risks I want to understand what they are, why I am taking them, and how to reduce them or to get out of them.’” Nola Masterson, Science Futures Management Company: “Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” (James B. Conant) Brian Barnier, ValueBridge Advisors: “What do a winning basketball team and a company with consistently higher returns have in common? The ability to ask ‘What if?’ more insightfully than their opponents.” Join us for Board Risk Oversight: What Are Regulators Saying?
Today’s buzz: Financial transformation. Finance professionals are on a treadmill, navigating the steep challenges of regulatory reporting, risk vs. opportunity balancing, new technology learning curves, and more. Bottom line: Rise to the occasion or fall off. The experts speak. Regina Edmiston, Deloitte: “Addressing the challenges facing finance organizations is a balancing act across process, technology and organizational components, with integrity of data and transparency to information as the underpinnings to any transformational changes.” KK Dave, Deloitte: “Finance transformation projects have a way of quickly growing bigger than anyone expected. And if you don’t watch out, they can grow out of control!” James Fisher, SAP: “’He not busy being born is busy dying’ (Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965). It’s ultimately about rebirth and the need to evolve and change, to transform.” Join us for Financial Transformation: Ready or Not!