| Opportunities for finance | | | | instead of collecting it (Wayne Eckerson, 2010). |
| The finance department sits at the heart of any | | | | Imagine a future |
| organization. Part of its job is to collect, disseminate | | | | - where the CEO calls a meeting and everyone |
| and analyze financial and non-financial information - a | | | | agrees on revenue, profit, and cost numbers, and |
| somewhat time-consuming and laborious process. | | | | decisions are made based on facts, not gut feel, |
| Finance can therefore be a powerful agent of | | | | tradition, or arm twisting. |
| organizational change. It can use the information that it | | | | - where a CFO checks the company's overall profit |
| collects to assist decision-making, achieve objectives, | | | | and loss position daily and, with a few clicks, views the |
| and avoid problems. | | | | contributions of every region, group, and product line, |
| However, a lot of finance departments are spending | | | | and then drills down to view individual orders and |
| too much time and effort creating financial | | | | expenditures at a product, customer, or supplier level. |
| documentation, and not enough time analyzing their | | | | - where a controller can automate the standardization |
| data. This is where Business Intelligence comes to the | | | | of financial transactions across a global company in a |
| rescue. Adopting BI practices frees the finance team | | | | few seconds and generate statutory reports in a few |
| from manual data collection and report production so | | | | hours or days. |
| that it can engage in more value-added activities. | | | | A new role for finance |
| BI tools can assist with the creation of a data | | | | To add real value to the organization, finance needs to |
| warehousing environment that contains all the data | | | | move beyond basic data collection and reporting. It |
| that the finance department needs, with the | | | | must analyze the information it collects for trends, |
| appropriate rules and calculations already applied. They | | | | patterns, and insights so it can advise the business |
| will also provide reporting, analysis, dashboard, and | | | | how best to improve operations, optimize |
| planning tools that access the data warehouse | | | | performance, and adapt to changing business |
| sources, as well as empower finance users to explore | | | | conditions. More and more organizations are now |
| data on their own without help from their colleagues in | | | | seeing that BI can be instrumental in pioneering these |
| IT. Once a solid BI infrastructure is in place, the finance | | | | kind of changes, not just for the finance department, |
| department can spend 80% of its time analyzing data | | | | but on a company-wide basis as well. |