Finance intelligence – implementing a self-funded analytics platform

Investing in an analytics platform that can pay for itself gives you access to more powerful insights that drive value and competitive advantage across your organization.

Why do so many finance transformations fail to reach their goals? Especially, with the amount of investment companies are currently putting into them to achieve the outcomes they want?

Simply put – data infrastructure and analytics aren’t given the same value as processes and technology during the roadmap creation process. This is because they are often seen as visibility enablers, rather than transformation drivers.

You need to think differently when investing in data and analytics. Moving away from a cost enabling tool towards implementing a self-funded value generator that pays for itself is a good first step in the right direction. But where do you start?

How to implement your self-funded analytics platform

First, you need to implement your analytics platform using mature automation software such as robotic process automation, machine learning, enterprise research planning, and system of engagement. This transforms your data into actionable business insights, enabling you to identify and address every friction in your finance functions and predict SLA and KPI trends across them.

Leveraging these insights effectively also equips your controllers with AI-driven capabilities, enabling them to ensure better finance compliance across your organization. This, in turn, helps you focus on the right metrics, measure efficiency better, and simulate improvement benefits before you implement them.

These new AI-driven capabilities also enable your transformation agents to measure the speed and value of any transformations within your organization.

However, the success of your analytics platform depends on a number of factors including how it’s implemented, data quality, the tools leveraged in the analysis process, and your ability to act on the insights you receive. This means you need to ensure your finance transformation team has the right analytics, process, and automation skillset needed to run your platform effectively and efficiently, while tracking outcomes that will deliver ”pay for itself” benefits.

Finance analytics – value at minimum cost

The business value and controllership benefits delivered by a properly implemented analytics solution include:

• Further cost reduction – provides actionable insights that streamline workflows and identifies areas for optimization
• Augmented reporting – generates accurate financial reports “on the go” through automation, enabling you to focus on more business-critical tasks
• Better decision making – grants access to more accurate data when you need it, enabling you to make choices driven by your data at critical moments
• Enhanced risk management – reduces financial loss and improves financial stability
• Improved compliance and regulation – facilitates better compliance rates across your finance processes, reducing the risk of penalties and fines
• More accurate customer insights – enables you to discover what your customers want, ensuring you can tailor your products and services to better suit their needs
• Enhanced fraud detection – prevents any financial losses that might be caused by potentially malicious transactions
• Enriched revenue generation – makes uncovering new revenue streams and improving pricing strategies much easier.

Connecting data strategically across your enterprise

In conclusion, investing in analytics alongside process and technology transformations will enable you to leverage your data as a valuable asset – giving you real insights into market ecosystem trends, customer behavior, and competitor analysis.

Leveraging this data strategically will enable you to drive growth, improve operational efficiency, identify new business opportunities, make better business decisions, and maintain a competitive edge.

In turn, this will help you to break down the silos separating your teams and connect data seamlessly across your entire organization.

To learn how Capgemini’s Finance Intelligence solution drives actionable insights that predict the future and support frictionless decision-making across your organization, contact: viorel.ciobotar@capgemini.com