By Rob Cools, Finance Transformation Specialist at Workday
Again this year, the University of Amsterdam, Workday, Agium, Finance on a Mission and Finance Transformation Forum conducted research on the state of finance transformation in the Netherlands. For this study, CFOs and senior finance professionals were surveyed via a survey, roundtable discussions, forums and 1-on-1 conversations. This year, the survey focused on the customer-focused organization. How customer-oriented is finance? Is finance able to deliver a tailored approach to support the different departments of the organization? What role does technology play in a customer-driven finance function?
Finance has great influence
Among other things, the study reveals that finance has a lot of influence on the ins and outs of an organization. This is recognized both by finance itself and by other departments. The research also shows that the more customer-focused finance is, the more influence it has on the decision-making process.
Finance considers its own department to be market and customer focused. An overwhelming majority of finance professionals surveyed agree that the finance team has a good understanding of its customers – and that finance plays an important role in determining an organization’s customer strategy.
“As the guardian of the numerical side of the business case, finance can lay a solid foundation under various market scenarios. Finance thus contributes to the early release of funds for new initiatives, an important condition for future success.”
— Respondent of the study ‘Finance in a Digital Era’
Timely, accurate data is essential for customer focus
Of course, finance is on top of every business case. After all, it stores and monitors the finances. To be able to assess the business case, however, it is important that finance has the right information. The period when decisions depended purely on financial data is behind us. More and more organizations are using additional information, such as customer data, product information and information about non-financial KPIs to support their decisions: gut feelings are being replaced by data.
It is essential that the right data is used and that this data is available in a timely and easy manner. And that is exactly where we see quite a few problems. Information is often transferred from one system to another and in some cases processed to obtain the desired insight. But: from that moment on, reports are no longer based on underlying, actual source data, but on processed data. This often gives a skewed picture of reality. Timeliness is also a risk. After all, transferring and processing data to data warehouses takes time and capacity, so that there is rarely any real-time analysis.
Report and analyze based on source data
If reporting and analysis are done based on the source data, both problems are eliminated. However, not all financial systems currently available are capable of meeting this requirement. And: all systems (such as finance system, customer system and analysis system) must use the same technology base and have the ability to process, report and analyze information in real time. Only the pure cloud solutions, such as Workday, can meet these requirements.
The research report ‘Finance Transformation in the Digital Era’ 2021 is requested here. Want to know how Workday’s finance system can help you move forward, then click here.
This article previously appeared on Workday’s website.
