In today’s volatile market and competitive global business environment, innovation is not optional

Acquisitions, organic growth, and cost efficiencies are traditional drivers for increasing shareholder value and are no longer viable differentiators. The free movement and rate of that movement of information, products and services has made it more difficult than ever to identify and maintain a sustainable differentiator. Mostly, innovation is the key to achieving differentiation and a long-term competitive advantage.

Just as organizations need to be agile and flexible to succeed in this environment, today’s CFOs must be just as innovative. Their role has evolved vastly from controller, to key contributor, and strategy formulator. They need to put numbers aligned to the company’s strategic options in a way that creates an excellent tool to make decisions.

Since CFO responsibilities are direct accountability for corporate performance, the role is complex and CLEC can help your corporate success.  It is key to focus on strategies that drive enterprise-wide value creation across the entire business.

Complexity includes shareholder value, corporate conduct, and compliance with regulatory rules and this requires CFO involvement with all corporate decisions which makes them highly direct.

Based on critical activities within a company, we can conduct a value creation audit for you so that you can understand what drives the company’s business in making money, profit margins and returns on invested capital (ROIC).  We will generate for you ways to improve these business drivers in areas such as operational process improvements, business model enhancements, etc.

Whether you are a private or public company, we can evaluate your company with the capital markets prospective in valuing impact of revenue versus higher margins, capital efficiency, and assess whether prices should be adjusted, reduce costs and see what would work best for you.  Since we are an external contract provider, we can provide your internal CFO with the expertise, if you have this position filled.  Since CFOs may have been promoted from other business units in the company, they now have to learn about the business drivers that were less important to their individual business unit performance.

Information sources for having expertise on business drivers are variable:

CFO responsibilities also include the ability to help drive agendas for CEOs and this will help identify important issues that need to be focused on and assume responsibility to mitigate impact.  It is obvious that CEOs explain required responsibilities in order to contribute performance for the company, and make their financial team highly effective to create value.  A unique CFO responsibility is to put business rule metrics and analytical KPIs to help make decisions on strategic activities.

The current pitfalls facing the innovating CFO

With globalization of resources, the enterprise finance and analytics function also needs to adapt to a global delivery model. That means business models that can be adapted quickly and accurately, with zero disruption. However, many of today’s business process applications are completely inflexible, costly, and change-resistant.

Even if enterprises can adapt their current business models, there is a lack of metrics to evaluate the impact on shareholder value from business process changes. That’s because most actionable information tends to be in silos, hampering the ability to provide performance metrics linkage to business goals.

We’ve all heard the term “collaboration is the key,” and the same goes for disparate applications of the existing IT landscape. There is a lack of standardized processes across operational units. Replacing or rationalizing existing applications is not always an option due to the need to maintain business continuity and legacy data. As a result, CFOs continue to see major investments in maintaining the existing applications thus reducing opportunities for innovation.

To be successful in this role, the CFO needs to establish relations and trust with the board of directors and the CEO, and make sure that they do not believe it is a conflict when they are being challenged on their decisions and the company’s direction by potential conflict.  That is why it is important to have an effective finance and analytical function supporting them in their finance team.  Additionally, when the CFO finds that the disparate IT systems, and high manual processes exist, it is sometimes difficult to obtain accurate data for decision making recommendations and ensure credibility.  Clear action items are financial planning, budgeting , and analysis, management recruiting, performance management, financial accounting reporting including audit and compliance, Finance IT systems with dashboards, balanced scorecards and heat maps, tax group capital structure, treasury cash flow management, and risk management.

Regulatory requirements are also highly important, not small. CFOs face increased risks and costs of compliance, which is different than just from investing in innovation opportunities. Volatility in the markets continues to demand improved risk monitoring.  The lack of risk monitoring frameworks means that CFOs are spending more time dealing with compliance issues and less time pursuing business and innovation opportunities.

Since information assets may be plentiful, a major portion may not be focused on, and they must become relevant and suitable for taking decision making actions.

Breaking down the barriers

With the myriad of business and technology barriers opposing innovation, the first step is to identify and implement business, process and technology flexibility that can support changing finance organizations and their unique business needs. Specifically, businesses need to implement the following:

Innovate on-demand with unparalleled speed and control by co-creating your next-generation F&A solution with CLEC

Additionally, CFOs need focused analytics to deliver ongoing shareholder value creation. This includes:

• A data integration platform that can provide consistent and reliable information across business applications
• A performance management framework that provides the link between performance metrics and business objectives
• Moving beyond performance management, provide an integrated governance, risk and compliance framework to ensure shareholder value optimization
• Provide risk management capabilities through event monitoring

CLEC technology alliance partners are very flexible providers of solutions for the most complex needs

True innovation—and the ability to capitalize on the ever-changing global business environment, depends in large part on the enterprise’s effective implementation of flexible business processes and focused analytics. Business goals and objectives need to align with business processes, which need to be quick enough to shift on demand to accommodate the enterprise’s business model. This will enable component repositories that tie into business services, transactions, performance and governance.

Our alliance partner Business Intelligence software firms can assemble tailor-made solutions for enterprises by leveraging its existing business component repository, and process-to-model to-application capabilities. In the end, it can enable a collaborative, comprehensive business model process and solution. This will enable fast business innovation, better time to market, re-use of existing assets, and the highest quality solution at lower costs.

Essentially, CFOs can leverage services and solutions that deliver on-going shareholder value. The completely integrated solution will tie everything together—from business transactions through shareholder valuation—and every process in between.  By doing it, the comprehensive solution will impact the CFO’s role and the function of finance and analytics:

• Provides on-premise, on-demand enterprise finance and accounting functionality:
• Governance risk and compliance
• Business analytics and corporate performance management
• Financial consolidation
• General accounting
• Payable management
• Receivable management
• Fixed assets
• Cost accounting
• Global taxation

                                  CLEC Collaborative Solution Innovation Platform

Provides option of setting up internal, onshore, near-shore, or offshore shared service centers

• CLEC offers a comprehensive compliance management in an ever increasing regulated business environment for all industry sectors
• Master data management capabilities for consistent enterprise-wide data and single version of the truth
• Focused analytics through performance management framework that supports operational, tactical, and strategic objectives
• Comprehensive GRC framework that integrates conformance with performance:
• Business process driven identification of risks and controls
• Controls repository to allow adaptation to new regulations
• Audit Management Capabilities to ensure periodic control assessments and compliance
• Role and risk specific dashboards for management reporting

There is simply no better way for today’s CFO to deliver ongoing business value, and innovate in the most effective manner possible.

C Level Executive Consulting - Enables fast business innovation, better time to market, re-use of existing assets, and high quality of solution at lower costs