Growth is on the top agenda of every CFO. The ability to generate good growth separates leaders who build a solid foundation for long-term profitable growth from those who build revenues on very shaky footing that ultimate crumble. I like to share with you a success story that shows how digital finance technologies help to take it from good to great.
This modern CFO of a global manufacturing company leveraged data analytics to steer growth with a very data-driven approach. The company was rapidly expanding its product lines and also going into new markets around the world. Finance organization had to play a strategic steward role and provide timely information to the management to refine the strategy.
Here is how they leveraged Emagia Analytics to gain better insights and run a data-driven growth strategy.
1. Starting with Common Data View – Earlier, it used to take several days and weeks to get reports from different business units, send them to business analysts to consolidate and provide insights to the CFO office. This was too slow and cumbersome. Connecting all financial systems to a single unified platform from Emagia allowed a single view of all financial data globally and in real-time. This ability to view the entire customer portfolio – revenues, risk, currency exposures, bad debt issues etc all at one place, became the key for making fast operational decisions needed to steer the organization.
2. Data Mining for Good Revenue Opportunities – Data is the new gold mine. and finance departments hold plenty. Advanced data analytics learn from historic data, build models to predict customer behavior patterns which can be used to segment your customers into good, bad and ugly groups. Data about which products the customer bought, what prices they were willing to pay, what discounts they have taken, what payment terms they have accepted, what their credit line utilization has been, how late they are paying, which products they are rejecting, how much and why they are disputing – all such information is mined everyday to segment the customers and identify profitable customer segments continuously.
3. Teaming Finance, Sales and Operations – Valuable information on where sales can sell more products and bring solid revenues is shared on an open platform which has brought the finance and sales executives together as a team for revenue building. Operational problems are identified with returns of goods or disputes on payments. These disputes were tied right into workflows and smart automation involving sales, logistics, service and finance teams to resolve in a timely manner.
Predictive analytics even help identifying issues ahead of time and alert the finance teams for proactive collections treatment. Customer payment patterns are also used to project very accurate short-term cash flows for treasury teams to manage working capital effectively. The possibilities of data mining are endless. The confidence on revenue growth is at all time high with this power at their fingertips.
The Take Away
Be creative. Mine your finance data in different ways and you will surely find keys to add more value to your business. The best place to start is to first gather your data.
