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How World-Class Finance Leaders Create World-Class Finance Teams

Part 1

 

Article taken from "Building a World Class Finance Organization" Presentation by Mark Blaufuss CFO, Metaldyne 

Request Full Presentation Slides Here

 

With the myriad of challenges businesses face each day, Finance leaders are being called upon to do more with less. Successful Finance leaders need an array of capabilities to handle the chaos that comes with the job. Cutting costs is simply not enough. Finance leaders must attract, develop and retain all-star talent in order to meet today's enterprise expectations. 

 

Benefits of a World Class Finance Organization

• Transforms finance into a valued business partner

• Allows management of the trade offs between business partnering and corporate governance

• Sets targets for improving finance’s business value

• Implements innovative budgeting, forecasting and analysis methods

• Reduces the costs of financial services and improves their effectiveness

• Identifies the new skills and talents needed to maintain  excellence within the organization

 

Characteristics of a World Class Finance Organization

1. Culture

  1. Highly communicative
  2. Fact based management/data driven decisions
  3. Promotion of insight/team participation
  4. Blameless environment
  5. Consistently evolving/transforming

2. People

  1. Establishing annual goals and measuring against them
  2. Cross-training (incl. various departments w/in finance)
  3. Job succession
  4. Professional development
  5. Incentive/Compensation strategies
  6. Honesty

3. Business Partnering

  1. Recognized as bringing value to the organization
  2. Fact based assessments
  3. Balanced approach to corporate governance
  4. Involvement in non-finance activities
  5. Cost Efficient Organization

4. Understand cost of the organization

  1. Assess/challenge costs, seeking on-going cost reductions (• Benefits derived from personnel and system costs / • Engaged approach to outside service providers
  2. Benchmark against similar organizations

5. Processes/Systems

  1. Automation
  2. System reliance
  3. Risk based authorizations
  4. Documented and defined
  5. Data management/retention

6. Reporting

  1. Simple and Concise
  2. Timely (2-3 day close)
  3. Consistency with operational management
 

Continue to Part 2


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