Organizational investments in new technologies such as predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation have allowed finance functions to increasingly deliver business value through greater accuracy, efficiency, and strategic insights.
But a company’s ability to reap all the benefits of corporate digital strategies depends on more than just investing in leading-edge technology. Organizations are learning that their finance workforce must elevate and differentiate their capabilities—both the hard technical skills and the softer communication and collaboration skills—so they can create more value for the companies they support and help drive business growth.
Deloitte is working with many companies across industries to help their finance function create strategies for and adopt ways of working and thinking digitally. Here are a few of those stories.
Case Study: Upskilling with Impact
A fast-growing client with outlets across the nation was struggling with the roles and responsibilities of their finance business partners within the commercial finance function. The client had worked to make sure that Finance had the skills and mindset to work effectively with other units of the company in order to help drive decisions and unlock new value, but they knew they needed to dig deeper.
Finance employees reported feeling hampered by the lack of definition of their roles and expectations as well as insufficient data, tools, and processes. Employees were compelled to do work that didn’t add value to the business, such as tedious manual transaction processing and generating reports that could be automated.
The client knew it needed to invest more strategically in Finance and help employees truly see what was possible in their roles—and for Finance.
Working with the client, we helped develop an ideal future state for Finance, including what “great” would look like. We worked with Finance to understand their current capabilities, and from that we built a road map to get to that future state.
We identified the skills that needed to be enhanced, and our findings were surprising; while Finance employees’ technical skills were critical, it was the soft skills like communicating, building relationships, and presenting with impact that business stakeholders really valued. Understanding these needs, we then built a playbook and created a set of “business partner” personas to form the basis of a capability uplift program. These were delivered via a two-day workshop that was rolled out to multiple teams over two years. Today, more than 120 finance employees have gone through the training, and Finance has improved qualitative performance rating, rapidly built stronger relationships with internal customers, and raised its profile across the enterprise.
This transformation was a cultural shift as well as skills training, and we were fortunate to have buy-in at all levels to make it happen. We are continuing to work with the client, creating future sessions and workshops to build a centralized learning hub for Finance. By investing in their finance workers, this client has doubled down on providing business insights, paving a path to the future for employees, Finance, and the enterprise.
Case Study: Fulfilling the Need for Speed in Finance
Another large global client had a slow, antiquated finance function and wanted to update its technologies, methods, and workforce. Leaders knew that Finance did not have access to leading-edge automation or visualization technologies, but there was demand across the business to reduce costs, create trusted insights more rapidly and adapt to a major business transformation.
The client operated several shared service centers that focused on transactional finance activities, but seeing the potential for cost savings, the organization wanted these workers to tackle management accounting, controlling, and planning as well.
The client knew that the tasks of management accounting, controlling, and planning took higher skills and better problem-solving abilities than more repetitive tasks demanded, so they decided to create centers of expertise, where workers could better develop these skills. We helped the client identify the activities that should be performed in those centers as well as identify the talent who had the right skills in the different shared service centers.
We then worked with the client to build a finance digital lab to introduce robotics, automation, visualization, and other technologies that could help finance workers perform their jobs more thoughtfully and efficiently. We also developed a digital finance academy that provided workers with training courses in each technology and at every level. So far, the client has been able to realize $35 million in savings, and more than 1,000 workers have benefited from the training—with more people and more ideas in the pipeline.
In working with organizations, we’ve learned that upskilling is a key component in Finance’s ability to innovate and the company’s ability to transform. Developing a strategic approach rather than relying on incremental tweaks can unleash the power of new technologies and the Finance unit together.
For this client, an internal effort that started off shaky resulted in a robust workforce change, significant cost savings, and a finance function that was brought into the future.
Click here to read more Deloitte case studies on digital transformation in the finance function.