Today’s CFOs are under significant pressure to provide tangible impact to their business. They must provide essential financial context for all strategic organizational decisions while collaborating more effectively with the rest of the organization. At the same time, these business leaders are tasked with keeping their departments in line to ensure that costs are constrained and opportunities are taken advantage of. This is easier said than done, however, as CFOs cannot accomplish this on their own and need to rely on business technology to support their goals. Aberdeen Group’s Excellence in Financial Management Survey found that the average CFO unfortunately receives information too late to make a decision 24% of the time. Further, that data is often not easily usable for CFOs, particularly with the hectic schedules they manage.
These pressures lead to a need for business solutions that provide easy and fast access to real-time financial data while providing capabilities that enhance the CFO’s (and that of other essential finance employees such as the controller and treasurer) ability to use that data to make decisions. These organizations must implement solutions that enable analysis of financial and operational data as well as an ability to create simulations and scenarios that enhance forward-looking decisions as well as recommended actions. For these reasons, the Best-in-Class are 66% more likely to have an enterprise-level BI tool (Figure 1). More importantly, the Best-in-Class are 78% more likely to have implemented predictive analytics. Further, these essential tools can be enhanced even further by pairing ERP and in-memory analytics.
Figure 1: Top Performers Rely on Analytics
To learn more, read the full report, Predictive Analytics for the CFO: Free Up Working Capital and Improve Profitability.
