If the CFO is counting terabytes, who's looking after the money?

Yesterday’s finance transformation focused primarily on cost control, process efficiencies, and establishing the right controls and risk-management procedures. Today, it is that and much more.

Like the CFO position itself, the finance function has evolved and taken on new dimensions supporting corporate strategy, the capital agenda, growth and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

As growth has returned to the business agenda of many companies, innovation is taking the place of cost-control and efficiency as a priority for many CFOs. Leading companies recognize innovation is everyone’s responsibility, championedby the leadership team, including the CFO.

A well-run Finance process enables innovation by freeing up scarce resources to focus on important questions and solve difficult problems.

Our Finance Process Excellence offering helps drive business innovation by assisting our clients with:

• Finance transformation programs — from a full transformation of the finance function to a transformation of interdependent processes such as budgeting and forecasting
• Rapid assessment services, including review of reports against best practice, balanced scorecard reporting, business planning, budgeting and forecasting, and reporting of actual performance for external and internal audiences
• Process efficiency reviews, including the design of metrics to improve process effectiveness and efficiency.
• Technology enablement which allows the finance process to reach its full potential.

CFOs often question whether their finance staff members are fully capable of performing their duties today and are prepared for the future. They lie awake at night wondering if they fully leverage the scarce human capital in their organizations.

At EY, we believe we can address this challenge.

Our People Excellence service offering makes a targeted effort to map finance’s current skill set, identify opportunities for improvement and help execute the roadmap to prepare the finance team for the future.

Our teams leverages a proven approach to:

• Assess the current strengths and weaknesses of the finance function’s current skill set
• Refine roles and responsibilities
• Benchmark against leading skills expectations
• Identify skills gaps
• Advise on recommendations for improvement

From there, we help clients develop the learning and development capability required to invest in finance teams, prepare them for the future and sustain improvements. We also help clients define and implement the talentmanagement processes required to achieve their vision.

Learning and development is a journey, not a destination. It takes a proven, repeatable process with continuous engagement of the finance function and an advisor who knows how to get it right.

• Driving business results with technology and people

At EY we understand the controller function and what it takes to balance the books, maintain control of the financials, mitigate financial risks, drive insight and do it all with an efficient team. However, we recognize that successful finance leaders look beyond this traditional finance perspective and are collaborating more closely with other internal functions for business planning and strategic decisions — not just from a monitoring, reporting and risk management perspective.

We can help finance become a trusted business partner, bringing closer alignment between finance and other functions, and a mutual understanding of key risks and opportunities. We are also passionate about looking across industries for bestin breed practices and bringing those tools to our clients, to make them faster, smarter and with less risk.

EY’s Finance Controlling Excellence offering brings together all of the key elements of an effective controllership function: people, process, policy, technology and delivery model, while promoting strong partnership between finance and the business.

We leverage our Finance Controlling Excellence offering to ensure our clients’ finance group can successfully support the strategic direction. We help clients build global target operating models, adapted from leading practices for their own uniqueness.

We leverage leading class technology such as SAP Simple Finance to drive the data, analytics and insights required to manage the business. This technology can revolutionize finance as it provides ‘instant insight’ based on real-time information, such as integrated planning, continuous processing, and predictive forecasting.

We design and implement finance delivery models to build the scale and consistency required to manage an ever increasingly complex landscape. And we do it all with an eye on risk and costs to minimize the burden on your business.

At EY we understand both the global standards and local complexities required of the controllership function. We help clients manage this balance all over the world.

• Agile business: Finance
• Simplifying the way companies do business
• Why an integrated platform is key to real-time insights
• CFO-CIO: a growing collaboration

Many organizations already have been implementing shared services and outsourcing in the last two decades. Finance led the way, followed by IT, focused on the handling of non-core company activities.

Tomorrow’s model for Global Business Services (GBS) is multifunctional, fully integrated, end-to-end process oriented and helps to transform your business. Typically, this is achieved through the creation of a unified GBS unit capable of managing end-to-end processes.

The move toward a Global Business Services organization is a process of evolution rather than revolution and from today’s perspective — ‘end-to-end’ Global Business Services are the end-point for this evolution. So far at least, very few companies have reached this level of integration.

Our Global Finance Delivery Excellence service offering addresses all levels on this journey: The setup of Finance Shared Services, the migration from Finance to Multifunctional and Regional Shared Services, as well as the migration from Multifunctional Shared Services to a truly ‘end-to-end’ GBS organization including Center of Excellence (CoE) structures.

We focus not only on the benefits to the individual function, but also how to contribute to corporate objectives and take a more strategic position in the enterprise-wide operating model.

We can help you determine the current maturity of your GBS journey in six dimensions: strategy, organization and location, service scope and maturity, migration and improvement, processes and automation as well as people and talent.

GBS fosters a commercially oriented culture and balances cost reduction targets with investments for process innovation. GBS is run as a full business unit with P&L responsibility and skill development and attraction of talent is a key to success for the new generation of Shared Services.

We are working with our Supply Chain & Operations, People Advisory Services, Technology, Customer, Risk as well as Human Capital and Tax teams to offer you these services consistently across functions, across the globe and in a fully integrated way.Our innovative ‘Build-Operate-Transfer’ approach can allow you to establish GBS more quickly and with reduced risk.

• Driving performance with global business services
• The new case for shared services