Two key trends are converging and driving the adoption of new software tools in financial applications:
•cloud computing platform technology has matured to the point that it is now mainstream, and has fundamentally lowered the barriers to scale and made new solutions instantly horizontal and global for enterprise customers.
•the increasing “consumerization” of enterprise software.
Solutions that Tie Relevant Data Together
Another problem is that consumer applications have changed the baseline for user interfaces. We want and expect an insanely intuitive and deeply addictive interface that allows the user to click and drill through to the right information nuggets without having to go through week-long training classes. And for corporate IT teams, the prospect of yet another deeply embedded, maintenance-intensive, complex implementation, on-premise software isn’t exactly a welcome sight. What’s needed instead is a nimble, flexible software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is easy to onboard, inexpensive to run, and doesn’t require a systems-down upgrade every nine months.
As it turns out, all of this is possible today with nimble cloud computing-based applications for finance. And forward-looking CFOs are moving beyond ERP and the associated segmented data streams to nimble, low IT footprint applications that can tie the relevant data together, distill key actionable intelligence and drive proactive workflow.
In the OTC world, corporations are automatically tracking six-month rolling averages on average payment performance by accounts across business units (and ERP). They are using that intelligence and others like standard deviation in past payment behavior to develop more accurate cash forecasting and drive better business decisions. Entire accounts receivable (AR) portfolios are being broken up into risk-based segments that are based on intelligence and risk criteria that is distilled real-time from the data spread across enterprise systems. As a result, AR departments are now utilizing customer treatment strategies for each segment – and for the first time interacting in new ways with entirely different customers – and reducing revenue leakage, decreasing DSO and optimizing working capital performance.
The timing couldn’t be better. As the first wave of large ERP-centric automations are nearly complete across global corporations, the low hanging fruit is mostly off the tree. That clears the path to the next layer of value drivers, and the focus is shifting from pure automation to leveraging the significant amount of data that now exists in the various automation systems in a corporation and distilling actionable insights that can drive increases in shareholder value. More and more corporations are now turning to new cloud computing based-technologies, and it is changing the face of the finance function.
Sanjay Srivastava is president & CEO of Akritiv Technologies, a Genpact company. He leads the overall direction and management of the company, and brings to Akritiv a diverse set of experiences across enterprise applications and the cloud computing stack.
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