Overview
Today's business environment requires Finance to not only meet its fiduciary obligations, but to also deliver strategic insight and “financial truth. Bottom line: Finance must itself become more efficient, and be able to provide insights into cost efficiencies elsewhere in the company. Top line impact: To drive stability and agility throughout your organization, Finance must also effectively deliver performance insights.
The ability to support this "partnering role" with the rest of the business requires transforming Finance by establishing a solid operating foundation based on common standards and processes to optimize Finance's operating model. This transformation should be considered within the context of your enterprise's strategy with a view on speed, agility and control. Data and process commonality support a shift to standardized service delivery models (such as a shared service center or center of excellence).
Obtaining the information necessary to generate timely, relevant insights can be extremely challenging. Drive reporting for performance insights that can help your enterprise spend more time on decision support and controls as opposed to transaction processing. How? By implementing data standards. By embracing a transformational change in your service delivery model, Finance can lower its "cost to serve" while driving step change improvement in overall effectiveness.
IBM's Finance Operating Model Optimization is an approach to determine the current levels of Finance effectiveness and capability, identify specific areas for improvement and create the migration strategy and roadmap to deliver these capabilities for your enterprise.
Business challenges
- Everything today is on the CFO agenda, leading to increased demands and more complex operational and regulatory requirements.
- There is an increasing rate of change, yet the ability to change is lagging.
- CFOs have an increasingly complex and strategic role with half the time on transaction processing.
- There are unacceptable transaction processing error rates (5% or higher).
- Closing and reporting takes twice as long for an average company than a world-class enterprise.
- The finance function isn't effective at providing value to its business customers.
- Finance spends too much time on reporting accuracy and monitoring in business reviews.
- Performance management is hindered through data dumps and data leakage.
- There is a lack of a holistic information management strategy.
- And a lack of adoption standards (standard chart of accounts, common processes, globally mandated standards and common data definitions).
Finance optimization services we offer
- Finance Transformation Strategy – provides a vision and roadmap to become an Integrated Finance Organization (IFO)
- Finance Operating Model / Organization Design - assesses Finance's current organization and redesign around service delivery models (including shared services and centers of excellence)
- Finance Process Improvement – helps establish global ownership and redesign and implement enterprise standard Finance processes to reduce costs.
- Finance & Administration Outsourcing – provides improvements through technology enablement, domain expertise and process excellence with global delivery capabilities
Why IBM
IBM differentiates itself from the competition because it provides a CBM framework for defining the activities performed in finance. We have undergone our own finance transformation (optimization of the finance operating model) with demonstrable results. This includes the full process ownership of Fixed Assets and Accounts Payable to a third party, IBM's Treasury centralized to four centers to streamline operations and provide capital efficiency, and Brand and Geo consolidation is centralized and analysis and general ledger is supported in geo support centers. To improve the efficacy of business support, IBM delivers planning from both centers of excellence and embedded staff. Forty percent of Finance resources are in Centers of Excellence. Optimizing global capabilities, shifting to higher value work, and lowering expenses have all been achieved through our Finance Centers of Excellence.
With more than 4,100 financial management resources located across the globe, IBM has a strong record of serving as a trusted advisor to CFOs and finance leaders. Our dedicated teams of research and thought leadership professionals provide insights into the issues facing finance professionals. This enables us to offer deep finance function expertise coupled with effective technology implementation and integration capability.
We offer proven finance transformation tools and experience, such as SAP, Oracle and Cognos. IBM Financial Management Consulting Services brings strong partnerships; we are the number one SAP Consulting Provider and a leading integrator of Oracle/Hyperion applications. Our recent acquisition of Cognos has added over 200 experienced Cognos practitioners to our Financial Management practice.
IBM has assisted more than 200 companies with the development and implementation of Shared Services with over 600 trained practitioners in a global network. We offer a structured Shared Services method providing a robust route map from strategy through implementation. Our Managed Business Process Services (MBPS) provides Finance and Accounting outsourcing to over 25 clients with over 5,000 staff. MBPS uses a three-tier delivery model with localized expertise centers, regional service centers and global service centers.
