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Digital Culture And Enablement In Finance Transformation Journeys

February 14, 2020 SAP

Part of the “Digital Finance Transformation” series that provides a framework for CFOs to move forward confidently on the journey toward digital transformation

In finance transformation journeys, one of the hardest parts is to create a positive climate that supports an innovative environment for change. This is one of the most mentioned key issues within the area of finance transformation. Digital innovation in business areas like logistics or sales is promoted much more heavily and therefore they serve as attractive role models for finance. Creating a tailored change-management plan that considers the organization’s culture is crucial for all CFOs.

Elements of a digital culture

Norms, values, and symbols are key indices that shape decisions, actions, and the behavior of organizational members. An organizational culture can be defined as a shared pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Thus, a digital culture evolves in digitally transforming companies. It’s a constant change process as part of a vision, especially for CFOs. The elements must be specified for financial departments based on the maturity of their digital culture.

culture blog Digital Culture And Enablement In Finance Transformation Journeys

The key elements of digital cultures are:

Leadership in a digital culture fosters autonomous working conditions for accountants, which encourages self-reliance, initiative, and self-management, as well as creating an environment where explorative working is desired.

An organization focused on entrepreneurship, digital technologies, and agility. It is also influenced by aspects of the leadership culture that support more flexibility to run digital projects.

Performance combines elements like entrepreneurship, innovation, and learning. Furthermore, it includes a culture of failure that supports employees trying out new ideas and approaches.

Cooperation within the organization is the main characteristic. It comprises knowledge-sharing and interdisciplinary and inter-divisional working. Collaboration and joint development with customers are also part of it.

Innovation combines entrepreneurship and learning as well as agility.

Change is related to the culture of innovation and contains the four elements of entrepreneurship, agility, innovation, and learning.

Growth, new business, and brand relate to agility as the keys to the use of digital technologies and digital processes.

Stakeholder and relationship are main characteristics of a digital culture leading to innovation and learning. In addition, customer orientation is key for a successful stakeholder and relationship culture.

Communication in a digital culture is enhanced by digital technologies and digital processes. They allow a new type of collaboration and cooperation within the organization and with interfaces to customers.

Changing existing into digital cultures

In a fast-changing environment, companies can stay successful if they change their holistic ways of working – if they change their culture into a digital culture. This insight can only be obtained by creating urgency for everyone. Providing digital tools in the finance area – for example, tablets – is an important requirement of today’s job market, but it also helps to lead a company into a digital behavior. Going one step further and in the context of financial IT projects, an agile methodology is essential to reach the right degree of innovation.

Alongside this, the measurement of success has changed. A classical sequence approach with one big “go-live” at the end of a project must be rethought. In addition, the requirements for project members, including the leadership team, have changed. They must enjoy the trust of all concerned stakeholders and pursue the same goals. This can be achieved only if employees of different departments and stages are united.

The vision and strategy must be communicated well. When all involved parties can muster a common understanding for an agile way of working, the risk that a transformation project will be canceled decreases. The motto here is: high tolerance for failures. Those who fail early learn faster. Therefore, a unified vision with a suitable strategy must be developed. At best, it has a motivating effect on employees and acts as a support during the first steps of change.

For a smooth transformation, the leadership team needs to remove potential obstacles. This ensures a higher commitment within all stakeholders as well as trouble-free business continuity. To keep all necessary stakeholders involved, short-term successes should be communicated and celebrated. This illustrates the transformation progress and keeps all parties in a good mood, which increases their commitment. Change is a constant companion in times of digital businesses. Therefore, a mindset of a steadily changing business environment needs to be established within the company. Only then can the company adjust to changing market demands and business requirements.

Takeaway

Changing a corporate culture to one of digital transformation is certainly not an overnight process. Every cultural change takes time – from the initiation to the moment when the culture shapes the action – and can only take place step by step. In summary, it’s best to carry out cultural change in areas where technological change is particularly relevant to business activity or for reasons such as cost optimization. It is important to focus on the corresponding quick wins, which in turn contribute to reinforcing cultural elements.

Dig deeper into “How CFOs Are Successfully Navigating The New Reality Of Uncertainty And Change.”

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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Digitalist Magazine

Starting A Digital Transformation Project

January 31, 2020 SAP

It seems like no day goes by without me hearing the word “transformation” tossed around, usually with the prefix “digital.” At a deep level, I think everyone knows and understands that transformation of any kind is not only difficult but, in most cases, has an extremely low probability of success.

The term digital transformation is a misnomer that has quite a lot of people confused. It is first and foremost transformation enabled by digital technologies. But people confuse this by making “digital” the operating word rather than “transformation.” This is probably where most of the trouble starts with all digital transformation projects.

And yet, everyone talks about digital transformation as if they are pretty sure that their project will not only see the light of the day but also be very successful.

In the past, people used terms like “innovation” and “disruption” so much and in so many different contexts with so many meanings that they lost relevance. It looks like digital transformation is going the same way.

Acceptance

I believe that to have even a shot at success, all {digital} transformation projects need to start from accepting the current reality or state of affairs. And true acceptance can only happen if we own the role that we have played in creating and shaping the current reality.

The questions that need to be answered at this stage are:

What is our current reality?

What was our role in creating this?

Are we happy with this reality?

If we are happy with our reality, there is nothing much to do except to continue doing what we have been doing. No transformation is needed. You can’t force-fit this onto a set of people who are happy with their reality.

If we are unhappy with our reality, the question then is: Does it hurt? And how much does it hurt? Does it hurt enough for the people to want to change? Change is difficult in and of itself, and it becomes a lot more difficult if it is done without wanting to change.

Vision

Once we decide that the current reality is hurting us enough and that we want to do something about it, we need to come up with a vision of what the future looks like. This is where taking on a leapfrog challenge would be a good start.

Leapfrog challenges, according to Porus Munshi, are challenges that force you to rethink the way you do things. This is your aspiration. The bigger and bolder the aspiration, the more you are talking about transformation.

A good example of digital transformation was the onset of ATM machines. They fundamentally changed how we interacted with banks. The same is happening now with peer-to-peer lending and the revolution that fintech firms are bringing.

The goal of any transformation project is to reimagine work, not to do the same thing faster or cheaper or better. There is a place for doing that; these projects are called continuous improvement projects.

Even if we are trying to make things better, faster, and cheaper, we need to look at the scale of impact. In his book Making Breakthrough Innovations Happen, Porus says it is better to take on 10x challenges rather than 20% or 30% challenges. When you are trying to do 20%, 30%, or even 40% improvement, you tend to do more of the same: work harder, reach out to more people, get more efficient, increase your sales conversion ratio, etc.

However, the moment you are attempting a 10x improvement, you know right away that doing more of the same is not going to help. You are forced to think differently, explore newer ways of working. You tend to look for completely new opportunities; you get permission to challenge the assumptions that the entire business or even industry is operating in, Therein lies the true opportunity to transform.

Alignment

Then comes the need to share this vision and get the teams rallying around the vision. This is not going to be easy. By definition, a 10x improvement project will sound too difficult. It will look improbable.

This will bring out all kinds of excuses from the team:

This is just impossible

No one has ever done this

We don’t have the ability or the talent to do this

We don’t have the budget for this

Our partners will not agree

Our margins don’t support this

And many more

This should tell you, the leader, that you are on the right path. If you don’t get these kinds of responses, it means that you haven’t aimed high enough.

However, it is now your responsibility to get the teams aligned and agree to the vision you want to aim for. Two ways to do this are:

Burning platform scenario: Show the team the grim reality of the present course of action and what that means for all. Make them feel the pain the team will have to endure if everything remains as-is, then show them that the only option is to burn your ships and march forward toward the new reality. The idea is to scare them enough about the current course that everyone wants to change and move toward the new vision.

Garden of Eden scenario: Talk about all the great things that the new reality can bring. This is when you motivate the team with a vision that is so much better than their current reality that there is no doubt in everyone’s minds that the new reality is where their future lies. This is all about enticing them with the gifts that the new vision will bring them, once realized.

It’s easier to use the burning platform, as humans typically react much stronger to negative than positive emotions. However, leaders need to be careful about which strategy to use, as people are not dumb and can easily see through any kind of deception. So, if you are not on a burning platform, don’t use one, or find a way to create one that all can agree with, then use it to kickstart your transformation project.

In conclusion

Two of the most important success criteria of a transformation project – digital or otherwise – are the scale of transformation you’re aiming for and getting buy-in from the people who will be working on the project. These are necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for any transformation project to become successful.

Strong execution is another necessary (but not sufficient) condition for successful transformation projects. I will talk about execution in a future post.

Want To Transform Your Business? Transform Your People

This post first appeared on Musings of a Neo-Generalist and has been republished here with permission.

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Digitalist Magazine

Where does “digital transformation” meet your customers? Usually in your sales quotes.

January 9, 2020 CRM News and Info

It’s no secret: Microsoft is keen on digital transformation, “reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes.”

And while many companies are implementing best practices in Microsoft digital transformation (we’ll call it MDT for short, here), just as many customers of those companies are greeting MDT with a collective shrug, saying, “Well, that’s great for you: what’s in it for me?”

They’re right. Because while we focus on MDT for ourselves or for companies we’re equipping with D365 CE, Azure, and Office, the people on the other end — the customers of OUR customers — don’t typically realize the benefits of MDT (or, more often, don’t realize that they’re realizing the benefits of MDT).

But when you put a quote in their hands — a professionally designed, vertically-targeted sales proposal with optimized product and pricing configurations — you are, in effect, also delivering the benefits of MDT to them as well.

If you’re serious about digital transformation as a cornerstone to driving more revenue and optimizing your overall business, then the way you put a quote into their hands is by extending Dynamics with a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution.

D365 + CPQ = connecting people, data, and processes

The point of MDT is to connect all three — people, data, and process — through your tech. But let’s talk about simply connecting people, first.

Connecting people

When you digitally transform your proposal process by adding CPQ to Dynamics (whether it’s CRM or ERP), you empower your own salespeople to create more effective, more professional sales proposals in about 50% less time.

Where does this part of MDT reach your customers? In both the process and content of the RFP response they receive from you.

Process-wise, you’ll be able to send a proposal more quickly and cleanly to each prospect, and also be able to more quickly and completely follow-up on each step of the process.

An MDT approach can help transform the content of your proposals as well via a dynamic product and pricing configuration engine that ensures only optimal pricing and product selections or bundles are presented to your prospect.

As CPQ is a centralized solution, the improvements it delivers are enterprise-wide. No matter what rep might be sending a quote, you’ll know that the look and feel are professional, that the pricing is optimal, and that it made it into the right hands at the right time.

Connecting data (and processes)

Adding CPQ to Dynamics helps you collect critical sales proposal data that you might not otherwise be able to capture. And that data can have an immediate impact on process improvements that drive more business.

First the data piece: while most CRM systems, for example, offer metrics around quotes sent and quotes closed, there are many other “moving parts” in the process that should be noted: replies, revisions, etc. When you apply MDT to your sales quoting process, you create the opportunity to uncover new data streams that can give you actionable insights to impact your bottom line.

Sticking with CRM as an example, when you connect this data to the rest of your sales funnel data, you get a clearer picture of what might be the most critical juncture in the process of turning a prospect into a customer: the timeframe when they move from receiving a quote to signing it.

MDT and ROI

When you digitally transform your sales quoting process by adding CPQ to Dynamics, you quickly empower your people and can uncover more data to fuel better processes. And as you’re applying MDT to the closing process, there may be no faster way to realize ROI on digital transformation.

Learn how one company digitally transformed its sales proposal process and saw quotes times reduce by 50%, errors reduced by 50%, and sales rep onboarding time reduced by more than 90%.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 5

January 8, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Strategy 5: Modernize and strengthen lead generation

Historically, banks have used “push marketing” to drive leads but this is becoming less and less effective. Direct mail, cold calls, and email can be intrusive. The last thing you want is a prospective consumer opting out of all further bank interactions.

Social media should be a lead-generation tactic for every bank. Social selling is considered “pull marketing,” and it often results in warmer leads that convert at a higher rate.

The buying process is changing and banks need to connect with prospective customers by serving them in the customer’s channel of choice. Doing so illustrates a bank’s sophistication and focus on customer experience.

How Dynamics 365 can help: Introduce social selling into your lead-generation strategy

In the age of social selling, researching the companies and people you are about to call is invaluable to the prospecting process. Social media such as LinkedIn and Customer Insights integrations allow for integrated research beyond current bank information.

The tight integration between Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn allows seamless access to LinkedIn profiles, prospects, and leads. Company details infused with social information allow you to drill down into related connections and pull lists of potential targets.

“Today ‘s highly digitally engaged financial services customer has 4.4 products, compared to only 2.7 for the digitally unengaged.”

Source: RFi Group

Social selling amplifies your ability to reach warm prospects. According to Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner), referrals, including social networking leads, rank highest in their qualification. And company news, recent posts, and promotions can all serve as great icebreaker conversation topics.

Crowe CRM for Banking powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps banks score and prioritize leads, track referrals, monitor social insights and record every customer and employee interaction in one place.

“Nearly half (47 percent) of U.S. social media users today actively seek customer service through social media”

Source: NM Incite Social Care Survey

Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper: 5 Ways Banks Overcome Strategic Challenges with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.

Crowe CRM for Banking

Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With Crowe CRM for Banking for Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.

For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit www.crowe.com/crm.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Red Thread Transformation: Building Blocks Of Connected Transformation (Part 2)

January 2, 2020 SAP

Part 2 in a 2-part series about the importance of devising a structured and referenceable digital transformation strategy. Read Part 1.

In Part 1 of this series, we addressed the idea of “looking through the right lens” for transformation by moving to an intelligent ERP system. Now, let’s now unpack what needs to be thought through and understand how each of these layers helps connect a logical and rational approach to transformation: “Why do you need to do what?” “What can you achieve?” and “How can you make it happen?”

Threaded thinking

Ambition: Why do you need to do what? Companies typically believe in the value of strategic and vision planning, and these are often deconstructed into corporate and departmental strategies, roadmaps, plans, and programs that can be referenced to create a lighthouse articulation of where the business wants to go.

Business capability modeling enables a clear articulation of the business ambition: what capabilities are needed to support the strategic intent. Once constructed and agreed upon with the business, this is the framework to help position the potential “pains and gains” in relation to capabilities.

Organizations need to know where they are going and for everyone to understand how to plot a way forward and measure success. This intent should be then further elaborated with experts from the solution provider in focused sessions sharing real experience from other customers on how to achieve this.

These sessions identify the pain points that can be alleviated and the gains to be achieved, informed by the “art of the possible” into a consolidated view from which to create tangible business value.

Value: What can you achieve? At the heart of any successful business-change program is a true understanding of the opportunities and challenges. This is where the light bulbs start switching on and the program starts coalescing.

Business and IT must engage in content sessions with experienced consultants and architects to detail how to close the gaps in current business capabilities to resolve the pains and make the gains. At this point, the business innovation opportunities are explored in light of the solution provider’s product and innovation roadmap for priority areas of the business capability model.

In these sessions, a common understanding is defined on the opportunity and the solution though the explanation of strategic gaps, pains and gains, and demonstration of product capabilities and innovations, product roadmaps, and pragmatic customer experience.

Essentially, this helps share an understand of the challenges and the potential solutions to establish solution fit, and get buy-in by demonstrating the business value in a more hands-on way. Furthermore, it establishes confidence in the ability to deliver business value.

It’s then a classic process of defining opportunities, validating performance through benchmarking, and articulating the value potential. “Must-haves,” “quick wins,” low- hanging fruit,” and “forget it’s” are prioritized into a set of focused opportunities.

Direction: How can you make it happen? Up to now, the focus has been on a forward-thinking view of business potential, prioritizing value. The challenge now is to design a successful transformation program to achieve this potential. This is where ideation hits the reality of how to make it happen.

A straw-man future solution model can then be built embedding all the capabilities into an architecture showing how the strategic intent is delivered by business capabilities, and what application services will be employed.

Early-stage opportunity potential will be identified that needs further evaluation as proofs of concept or co-innovation with product teams. Roadmaps will be developed for each function area, describing the business opportunities aligned to the core product roadmap to secure a future-proofed functional roadmap, taking advantage of the standard product. This then needs to have been consolidated into a single roadmap to show how the business can deliver future business capabilities in an integrated platform.

The challenge now remains to plot dependencies around the business priorities, other programs, product roadmap, and technical dependencies. A review of implementation approach options, pros, and cons will then help define the best implementation approach. The outcome is then a firm and trustworthy transformation roadmap and plan as the foundation for a business case.

The final step is to summarize this work into a case for change and to make recommendations to the board with a robust business case and proposition. This will make clear how the proposed plan supports the strategic business intent, the true business value potential, the cost of viable options and plans to secure the investment, and the recommendations for immediate plans and resources needed to make this a reality.

Conclusion

It is essential that business challenges and digital changes be guided by a clear line of sight of a thread connecting business ambition, the value, and a carefully thought-out navigation of the direction to get there.

By investing in this structured process, the transformation program is informed, clear, and purposeful. It will demonstrate the benefits of a tightly oriented team that can efficiently deliver its business outcomes.

Why look to SAP for help

In collaboration with the business, IT, and partners, SAP Digital Business Services can provide the glue to help your organization navigate across this “red thread” to articulate how technology solutions in the hands of an empowered workforce can deliver on strategic goals. SAP consultants and architects connect via their own networks to engage SAP product owners and developers in this dialogue. They also advise on using the latest agile accelerators, tools, and methods to design, implement, and support these solutions most effectively.

Discover how SAP S/4HANA can help you transform your business for dramatic results.

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Digitalist Magazine

AI Digital Document Transformation Increases Business-Critical Efficiencies

December 17, 2019 BI News and Info

According to a study by Xerox, 46% of respondents say their time is wasted by paper-intensive workflows. Despite that fact, almost 50% of businesses have only just begun or are still considering implementing digitization.

The fact is, paper just can’t move as fast as digital files. The same goes for humans. Although we are fast approaching a truly digitized age, many industries, such as law and government, still struggle with paper dependency as a result of legacy business processes.

Luckily, digital document transformation via AI and machine learning can help streamline business-critical processes via automation and the marvel of modern computing. Companies that don’t ride this wave may well get left behind.

How does it make business more efficient?

Automatic and consistent drafting of documents

A lot of time goes wasted by using staff hours to draft new versions of existing documents. Every time a new employee joins, it means going through a process of training on how to use the house style. All of this can be (and already is) sped up by document automation via AI and machine learning.

Or let’s say you sign a new client and log them into the system. A standard agreement can be automatically drafted that uses the client’s name and details within seconds. You can rest assured that there will be no human errors and that the styling will be consistent.

This will allow your employees to focus on their job and not the mundane and repeatable task of drafting documents.

Classification and processing

The amazing ability of AI and machine learning algorithms to extract data has another use. These machines have become remarkably good at reading the context of content. Documents can easily be sorted into document clusters or arranged by date, topic, field of business, etc. Some document management software does this by using optical character recognition (OCR) to read text content.

Not only does this cut down on time to do this manually, but it also has a host of other benefits. Documents are easier to find once they are digitally filed, and this further reduces your dependence on physical copies.

Data extraction and analytics

Being able to automatically “read” information has another important use. AI algorithms can pick up data points or important pieces of information and collate them across documents. Businesses are then able to pull specific data sets from their documents.

This doesn’t just go for what’s in the documents but also the documents themselves. You can get info on how many documents you have according to type, client, etc. It will allow you to track your own document usage and statistics and stay on top of shifting patterns and trends. It can also lead to future integration with automatic invoicing, for one example.

Streamlined digital admin and document management

Document management software suites usually come with an easy-to-use interface that you can access from the computer. Instead of handling physical documents or having to make changes to templates or existing documents one by one, this interface streamlines the process.

For example, a law firm has many different types of documents. However, it might use a consistent header or logo at the same place on each page. Through the software, you can update these graphics, and the algorithm will make the necessary changes across your company document templates.

Business processes can even be built into the AI’s logic. Documents can be automatically sent to the right individual or department according to workflows based on simple rules. In this way, there is no reliance on a middleman to send documents from one party to the next. Signatures can be automatically collected and the document then forwarded to the next relevant party, for example.

Start to embrace a paperless future today

The benefits of AI and automation in document digitization actually boils down to one thing: Allowing your management and employees to focus on their job expertise. This will streamline business across the board by maximizing working hours and cutting down on admin.

The field of AI document transformation is still very new, but progress is being made with lightning speed. Integration with blockchain technology is already happening and will take the verification, security, and redundancy of document management to a new level. Start on a digitization campaign today to stay at the forefront of streamlining your document-related business functions.

Assistant bots are developing so rapidly that they’re quickly moving from business automation to becoming an integral adjunct to the human mind. Download the executive brief “Robotic Process Automation: The Dawn of Unlimited Intelligence.”

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Digitalist Magazine

5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 4

December 10, 2019 CRM News and Info

There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Strategy 4: Build consumer relationships through data and digital transformation

Banks recognize the need to enhance their competitiveness and create an agile, sustainable advantage.

A bank’s unique customer data provides a rich repository from which to draw. This translates into a significant opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell products and services that are relevant to the consumer.

Data intelligence helps turn the raw data into targeted, effective value propositions and marketing strategies.

How Dynamics 365 can help: Customer Insights helps you engage your customers with intelligent insights

Crowe CRM for Banking provides rich data visualizations to help you better understand the customer. By composing role-specific visualizations that bring together customer profiles, interactions, metrics, inferences, and predictions, you can uncover new insights with the security and privacy you require.

Banks can use predictive analytics to understand and expand customer lifetime value. Relationship managers can check overall account, loan, and churn rate, which can help them foster customer loyalty. Predicted lifetime events, such as buying a car or college for kids, help relationship managers recommend the next best product or service.

“Smart use of data can enable us to re-establish personalized services and bring back customized one-to-one relationships between the bank and the customer.”

Source: Alex Nechoroskovas, Founder of Fintech Summary

81 percent of financial services CIOs say advanced analytics have the most potential to change organizations.

Source: Gartner, “2017 CIO Agenda: A Financial Services Perspective,” Feb. 9, 2017

Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper: 5 Ways Banks Overcome Strategic Challenges with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.

Crowe CRM for Banking

Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With Crowe CRM for Banking powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.

For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit www.crowe.com/crm.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Five Automation Technologies To Catalyze Finance Transformation

November 20, 2019 SAP

Part 3 of the “Finance Transformation” series that explores how finance can take the lead in driving their companies towards an intelligent enterprise

To ensure that the business operates smoothly, finance organizations routinely execute a multitude of operational tasks. But as the world becomes globally connected, new players with new business models emerge, and regulatory complexity grows, businesses are beginning to expect even more from their finance teams. They need finance to look beyond those operational tasks and provide more sophisticated support – such as real-time analysis, business model simulation, and predictive, forward-looking insights. This enhanced support helps leaders make optimum decisions to adapt and shape business models for the future of their enterprise.

Benno Nov fig Five Automation Technologies To Catalyze Finance Transformation

No doubt, those operational tasks still need to be done. And this increasingly heavy workload needs to be completed without any additional headcount. This is where a new generation of automation technologies comes in.

Tools that transform

Your organization has doubtless deployed automation to streamline processes, reduce mundane work, and realize cost efficiencies. And that’s been great.

But we know the business needs more insight to make the right decisions. The insights delivered by traditional systems are backward-looking, providing reporting on “actuals.” Leading finance organizations are discovering the next generation of intelligent technologies, transforming core finance processes while also delivering predictive insights that can be used to proactively steer the business.

Let’s take a look at five key opportunities.

An assisted user interface can provide context-sensitive help, including supports and alerts that are specific to each business situation. Conversational interactions and speech-controlled assistance can help automate routine finance tasks. For example, think of a finance representative who is conversing with a customer. An assisted user interface can check for open issues such as unresolved service tickets or unpaid invoices, automatically displaying data about these issues on the rep’s computer screen. Now the rep knows exactly what the customer is thinking about – why he didn’t pay an invoice, for example – and how to resolve the issue without having to dig through multiple systems or screens.

Intelligent finance applications can help simplify, accelerate, and automate processes. In traditional systems, finance processes have been hindered by technical limitations. But those barriers have been removed with blazing-fast in-memory database technology. On top of that, optimized and simplified data structures allow companies to build use cases to support employees in a way that was not possible before. Using these new technologies, some leading software companies have redesigned their applications to support embedded self-service analytics with powerful predictive functionality. The best solutions can help you make the right decisions faster than ever before.

Intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), and predictive analytics can simplify finance operations. Rule-based automation allows firms to specify preferences for specific operations and execute them according to the rules. In contrast, machine learning technologies learn from past transactions and customer decisions, sensing decision-making patterns and using those patterns to make future choices. RPA technologies run repetitive, rule-based monotone tasks and connect disparate systems, so you can free humans from huge volumes of manual tasks across diverse systems. Predictive analytics drill down into past transactions and use the insights derived to anticipate what may happen next, enabling your team to make more accurate strategic decisions.

A universal journal can help eliminate redundancy by recording and storing every financial transaction in one table. With actual, plan, and simulation data in one place, a universal journal helps you create a single source of financial truth that is both consistent and easily reconciled. Information is also accessible for instant, precise analytical research.

An integrated data platform centrally stores both transactional and analytical data across systems and provides access to all of your information with real-time speed. It allows users to find data correlations and to drill down to find the root cause, no matter the data’s original source.

Path to intelligent finance

The benefits of enhanced automation are significant for today’s finance organizations. Intelligent finance innovation can improve operational efficiency while enhancing governance and compliance. What’s more, leading companies are reducing costs by automating end-to-end processes.

With advanced technologies, finance organizations can identify and rank information that positively correlates with fraud or noncompliance, helping them detect and prevent costly anomalies. Proactive, context-sensitive assistance boosts the productivity of financial experts, freeing them for more value-added efforts. And greater insights into the future are helping these firms make better decisions that facilitate their desired business outcomes.

Many finance leaders believe they have all of the automation they need to serve the business. But as the business increasingly asks for more from finance organizations, it’s time to consider advanced automation solutions that go beyond streamlining operational tasks. The latest generation of technologies is poised to deliver insight that can catalyze your finance transformation.

Are you ready to reconsider the role of automation in your finance organization?

Join the second SAP Intelligent Finance virtual event on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020, and explore the new reality driving finance transformation. Register now.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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Digitalist Magazine

Why smart search is the cornerstone of digital transformation (VB Live)

October 21, 2019 Big Data

Presented by Lucidworks

Employees have a full spectrum of content and data, but it’s easy to get lost in unproductive, dead-end hunts. Join this VB Live event to learn how AI-powered smart search boosts efficient data discovery and insights that deliver real-world, high-value solutions for complex problems of every size.

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Digital transformation means pivoting to become more efficient, data-driven, and nimble. Traditional enterprise search is anything but.

To do their jobs, enterprise employees need to tap into a huge amount of content and data available both inside and outside the company, and the tools they’re handed aren’t up to the job, says Simon Taylor, vice president worldwide channels & alliances at Lucidworks.

“The volume of data in those silos has created a form of disconnection, both from the employee to the information and the employee to the application, which ultimately drives down productivity,” Taylor says. “Also, if you have too much information, you get information overload.”

A lot of employees today are disengaged at work because they can’t get to the information that makes their role or purpose more relevant, he explains. Their search results aren’t relevant enough to their specific role, or surfaced to them in relevant contexts, and that’s why employees, particularly millennials, get frustrated in their workplace, he adds. They’re very used to tools they use externally, whether it’s social media or browsing or searching.

“The workplace is having to transform the way it does things, to provide the same type of demand level tools, relevancy level tools, insight-driven tools, to make employees more productive,” Taylor explains.

He warns that if you don’t have the right solutions in place, or even the right insight tools to drive productivity from employees, you’ll make bad decisions, and the company as a whole is going to spend more money on operationalizing things that fundamentally should be a lot easier — and that’s where you get a strong business case for search.

Two types of AI-powered search differentiate businesses today. In curated search you give the AI framework direction about what you need to learn, and then ask it to surface insight that’s relevant to your personal journey in order to make more informed decisions about how to use that information.

On the flip side of that is deep learning, which auto-curates the most relevant topics and classifications and categories, or the ontology, from the data, and then presents it as a corpus of information with recommendations about how to best use it.

In a business context, both curated and uncurated search is essential, and can drive value in three areas. The first is making access to information more efficient, and delivering contextualized, relevant results quickly — for instance, use cases like HR portals.

With natural language processing and machine learning, knowledge management tools can serve responses through an automated communication platform like chatbots. It improves efficiency and it saves money too, by reducing the amount of operational resources required to answer rudimentary questions.

The third category of solution is finding opportunities to make money, or the data discovery area, which helps employees find ways to do things more quickly and actually drive more revenue.

He points to an oil and gas company that had spent money repeating the same research three times in a 10-year period because their ECM (enterprise content management) was not able to find and pull up the records for previous studies. This was to determine the viability of a new drilling site, and, of course, each time the study gave researchers the same result — the area they were exploring would not be a lucrative drill site, and they would not be getting back the time and the money they had wasted discovering that again.

AI-powered search broke down the company’s information silos so that they were able to access research that had been done across the business, and better decide where to focus the company’s assets and resources in order to get the most value.

“That business case, for them, represented multi-billion-dollar savings and revenue generation,” Taylor says. “It’s the real power of search, when you can deliver some significant business-changing direction.”

Transitioning to an AI-powered search tool isn’t really optional these days, he adds — your competitors are doing it to get to information in the most efficient way possible.

“It’s not a resource thing, where you can throw more people at it,” he says. “You have to become clever in the way that you apply technology and think smarter about the way you use it.”

To learn more about how search and machine learning can deliver both savings and revenue opportunities, a look into some of the most compelling business use cases, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Don’t miss out!

You’ll learn:

What operationalized AI means
How search and machine learning align to drive efficiency and Opex (operational expenditure) savings
How search and machine learning can create revenue opportunities
Success factors for operationalized AI and top lessons learned

Speakers:

Simon Taylor, Vice President Worldwide Channels & Alliances, Lucidworks
JP Sherman, Enterprise Search & Findability Expert, Red Hat

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The Effects Of Digital Transformation On Internal Controls

October 21, 2019 BI News and Info

In the digital economy, change is rapid and often unexpected. Technological and business-model innovations are disrupting market dynamics, while economic and geopolitical uncertainty injects a whole new level of volatility into the business environment. As a result, internal control functions face two seemingly mutually exclusive challenges:

They have to adjust to a riskier environment…
… but not hinder their companies’ ability to keep up with the speed of change.

Companies that fail to address both challenges risk the erosion of their competitive advantage.

An intelligent internal controls process

The Hackett Group’s research indicates that finance executives are looking to smart automation to tighten controls while at the same time enhancing their agility. With tools like robotic process automation (RPA) and AI-enabled analytics, they are beginning to automate compliance monitoring and remediation activities. They are also using machine learning solutions to detect suspicious activities, identify emerging control points, and learn from experience on an ongoing basis.

Right now, the function’s automation levels are low. But respondents to The Hackett Group’s recent “Internal Controls in the Age of Disruption Study” (2019) expect a significant increase. For example, they project that the adoption of advanced analytics solutions will more than double over the next 12 to 24 months.

The anticipated rise in the deployment of smart automation tools is mirrored in the current and future impacts of digital transformation. Over the next couple of years, study respondents expect digital technologies to significantly raise companies’ real-time visibility into controls violations and dramatically enhance the reliability of detective activities. The highest impact will be a reduction in the number of required controls and shorter testing time (see image below). By eliminating a lot of manual work, internal controls teams can better target fieldwork and free up staff to focus on higher-value activities.

Oct 21 19 The Effects Of Digital Transformation On Internal Controls

Building a business case

There is certitude that internal controls must up the automation quotient. However, in conversations with clients, we find that a huge obstacle is a lack of resources, both human and financial. This gap ranked at the top of the list of challenges facing internal controls functions today.

As a result, internal controls leaders are looking to build a strong business case to get management buy-in. Our analysis can help. When we correlated the efficiency of the process with the degree of the function’s automation (based on 40 automation measures), the results were extraordinary. We found that by moving from a state of low technology enablement to high technology enablement, internal controls can slash process costs by 69% and headcount (FTE per US$ 1 billion in revenue) by 62%. Organizations that are more highly automated can also reduce their external audit fees by nearly 80%.

Clearly, there’s a measurable return on the investment in internal controls automation. The opportunity for improvement is vast. It’s up to internal controls executives to grab it.

For more on the benefits of finance automation, see “Sizing The Prize: The Digital Finance Advantage.”

The Hackett Group is an SAP platinum partner.

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