The modern Chief Financial Officer (CFO) has more to bring to the boardroom table than a stack of reports and spreadsheets. Today, finance must bring commercial insight, ready to guide the business’s strategic direction.
Business managers risk losing ground by prioritizing short-term victories over long-term transformation initiatives that can guarantee their sustainability in the future.
Research from McKinsey, a consultancy, highlights how in the digital economy, winners tend to dominate to a massive degree, with competitors either out of business altogether, or fighting for tiny market share.
The implication is that organizations are accelerating their journey and investment in digital and climbing the maturity curve to meet changing customer demands. Finance is no different. Finance professionals need to leverage technology to augment planning and forecasting to play a more strategic role, now more than ever!
Jedox, a leader in cloud planning, provides an essential mix of FP&A processes, predictive capabilities, and artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML), to help CFOs transform themselves into trusted, data-driven, strategic advisors to the organization.
It is imperative for Finance professionals to leverage technology to expand beyond traditional functions such as accounting, financial budgeting, and statutory reporting. Advanced technologies help CFOs and CEOs harness supply chain, operations, sales, marketing and HR data to gain a holistic understanding of the organization. A technology-driven finance team, led by an AI-guided, data-savvy CFO can deliver higher return on invested capital.
In many ways, the CFO is a new-gen CDO (chief data officer), one that’s evolved from purely financial data to a broad remit to provide the information and insights that drives the entire business.
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One of Jedox’s clients is a global leader in the chemicals industry. The company’s finance team learned about the power AI-augmented planning and ran a pilot to validate the results. The results were compelling with more detailed, more accurate and faster planning cycles.
As a result, the chemicals giant was able to boost the accuracy of its sales forecasts by up to 95 percent, within months of adopting the solution.
“We can [now] plan at a level of detail that was not possible before. With the AI engine, we can achieve very accurate forecast values and also see a lot of potential for further optimization and automation,” says the company’s director of performance controlling.
What their Finance team achieved with Jedox did not require data scientists. It’s something that FP&A teams in retail, FMCG, energy and many other industries now achieve.
Finance departments can increase the speed and quality of their forecasts, identify what drives the business — and what holds it back. Critically, this new insight is then embedded into existing FP&A processes such as Integrated Business Planning, and thereafter, the results can be used to drive behavior change throughout the organization.
Augmented FP&A is based on intelligent algorithms available in the Jedox platform. AI and ML use data created by combining relevant external sources into a data hub, and can surface the types of information that lead to better decision support and a short, medium and long-term strategic view on which the entire enterprise can rely.
But while the outputs are sophisticated, the true power is the ability to place this squarely in the hands of the Finance professional. Meet AIssisted™ Planning, the machine learning-powered engine at the heart of the Jedox Enterprise Performance Management platform.
AIssisted™ is designed for finance. It connects traditional driver-based business modelling with the power of AI. Professionals can now intuitively create simulations and scenarios to predict the future with no programming, scripting, or coding.
Finance professionals have never had such unparalleled power to share such deep operational insight and foresight, so simply and quickly. Now it’s within their reach, they must act quickly, or as McKinsey notes, the winners take all.
Source: techwireasia
