By Bridgepoint Consulting
July 7, 2022
Your strategic planning process has uncovered opportunities for large scale changes in your business. One of those opportunities is a move of your corporate headquarters. And moving to Texas would provide you with more flexibility due to the limited regulatory environment, more capital from economic development incentives and savings on corporate taxes, and access to a diverse and talented labor pool.
Undertaking such a move is a transformational change to your company. Where else would transformational change make sense for the organization? Maybe it is in the Finance department. Then you ask the questions, “how do I get started?” and “what can I expect along the way?”
BE METHODICAL AND STRATEGIC
- Connect to business goals — The primary objectives and priorities for the organization should drive the primary goals for finance transformation.
- Focus on key differentiators and core competencies — Finance transformation should enhance the business’s ability to do what it does best. Activities that do not directly support these core competencies can always be outsourced.
- Tear down silos — Be relentless about uncovering the business areas that are not enabled for cross-organizational collaboration, whether they exist between sales and marketing, sales and delivery, production and sales, delivery, and warranty. Avoid creating new systems that maintain existing silos (or build new ones).
- Prioritize high-value processes and relationships — If a process or relationship is crucial to the bottom line, it should be one of the priorities for finance transformation. Also, look to the most likely cases first. If 90% of orders are processed one way, optimize it first, then address any exceptions.
- Identify the right people to lead the process — Confirm that people leading the transformation are eager to embrace the change and have the ability and/or are in the right positions to drive change management with other employees.
ALIGN EVERYONE TOWARD THE SAME GOAL
- Secure executive sponsorship — This process will challenge the organization in ways it has never faced, so leadership must be on board.
- Expect some conflict — This will help you build systems that enable customer-focused processes and structures to facilitate growth.
- Focus on the customer — This will help you build systems that enable customer-focused processes and structures to facilitate growth.
- Use best in class/benchmarks as part of the alignment — This will focus on the organization and support the change initiatives underway.
SMOOTH THE PATH BY ADOPTING CHANGE MANAGEMENT POLICIES
- Recognize the challenge — Management team must lead the change, embracing the need for new skills and processes. This will require aligning skill sets with roles through retraining, redeployment, and retention. • Communicate, communicate, communicate.
- Focus on tasks, not roles — As you work to transform any given process, look at the steps involved, not necessarily the role that performs those steps.
- Gather input from relevant stakeholders— Include stakeholders from all departments in the planning stages and throughout the implementation, to capture different perspectives and experiences. Also, include critical vendors and customers in the process where appropriate (surveys and questionnaires are excellent tools to use with third-party stakeholders).
- Retrain or relocate people as manual processes are eliminated — This is one of the biggest challenges in a transformation initiative.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES
- High-Speed Integration Capabilities – Most organizations have three or four mission-critical systems. As a result, these companies struggle with siloed or unreliable data and cumbersome reporting processes.
- Automated Workflows – Most software has automated workflows within siloes for years. With today’s integrated backbones, however, workflows can now be integrated and automated across processes, departments, and platforms – and even from supplier systems through to fulfillment and customer portals.
- The Cloud – Cloud-based applications are always on, always up to date, and available anywhere with an internet connection. Many are also industry-specific, such as apps built to handle the privacy and security needs of healthcare organizations, or tools designed for the compliance and reporting needs of finance or energy companies. T
- Real-Time Analytics – Before finance transformation, a company might close the books for the month and get the data as much as a month later. At the speed of today’s business, that is too late to react in any meaningful way – plus that data is disconnected from every other area of business. In an integrated, realtime environment, actionable business insights are unlocked when data is freed from its siloed systems, always shared and available.
Bridgepoint Consulting has compiled a free e-book on “Making the Case for Finance Transformation” that you may find helpful as you move your company to Texas and take the opportunity to evaluate your Finance department as a part of your overall business strategy.
To learn more, visit: https://bit.ly/37TnROD
