Finance Now!

When we look around us, the world is transforming in a faster pace than ever before. Ten years ago most people were booking their holidays through a travel agent. Five years ago no one in Europe was using Uber, Airbnb or Netflix.  In 10 years’ time we will have self-driving cars. This is changing our behaviors and how we are doing business today. Most of the people following this webinar will use their iPhone to book their travel or make payments via their banking app. Yet when we look into the finance organizations of our clients, we see that companies are still in the early stages of applying digital technologies to finance processes in ways that create more efficiencies, insights and value over the long term.

We also see business model and industry changes that impact what finance does, where the work is performed, and who is performing the work. As new business models emerge, or industry models converge, finance has a role to play in deciding not only where to invest, but also how we measure return on investment. Further, changing workforce demographics will also place pressures on the finance function.

Taking into account all these business disruptors, finance needs to look forward 3 to 5 years. In 5 years’ time there will be access to faster and better information, more predictive and automated forecasting accuracy, and the need of different skills and talent management strategies.

In this webinar, we’ll first cover KPMGs Global Point of View on the Future of Finance, elaborating on how we believe CFOs and their finance teams will look in the future and the business drivers triggering these changes. Then we’ll discuss the evolving role of finance and the questions we see today at our clients. Finally, we’ll look at how to get started on your finance transformation journey. 

Many companies are struggling with the financial closing and are looking into ways to streamline the processes while automating them at the same time. With the Smart Close principle, KPMG is assisting companies in redesigning their closing process and installing digital solutions to enable quality and efficiency.

One of the most important processes in a finance team is the monthly, quarterly or annual closing process. Yet we see that many organizations struggle with this process:

1. First of all: It takes ages; many CFOs complain that the process takes too long. In some instances they are already into the following month before they have the numbers from two months ago.
2. Secondly: They have neither insights into nor control over their numbers. This results in a longer time for management review in order to understand the impacts and changes from the prior period.
3. Thirdly, the process is scattered across the organization: there are many people involved in a closing process and there is no global process owner. As a result you as a CFO do not have a full overview.
4. Finally, we get many questions on available tooling in the market to bring more structure and control to the closing process, as well as opportunities to automate the process.

In this webinar, we will share insights into about the challenges and constraints companies encounter in the closing process, give you KPMG’s definition of a true Smart Close process, discuss the benefits of Smart Close, and give you some insights into implementing a Smart Close process in your organization.

Powered Finance enables organizations to accelerate their finance transformation, using a preconfigured solution with predefined processes, controls and KPIs.

In our Introduction to Powered Finance webinar, we will show how we have combined our global leading practices into a tangible toolkit that accelerates your finance transformation from design to implementation. The webinar will demonstrate how a Powered Finance implementation can accelerate digitalization and standardization of the finance function as an answer to many of the challenges today’s CFO’s are facing. 

The increasingly complex and changing business environment is creating new demands for effective business planning. Integrated Business Planning (IBP) enables organizations to link their strategic, financial, and operational plans and integrate them to steer value drivers, budgets, and forecasts. 

In this webinar, we will discuss how your organization can align strategic planning, finance, supply chain, sales, marketing and product development into a unified and flexible operating model, using the IBP approach. More specifically, we will look at what Integrated Business Planning is, which problems it solves, what the role of technology is in IBP, what the benefits are of IBP, and where to start if you want to adopt the IBP approach. 

In today’s complex and quickly evolving business environment, CFOs and cost controllers need real-time and granular insights into the cost of their businesses, products, customers, and activities in order to monitor performance, be able to identify improvement and investment opportunities, and make the right strategic business decisions. Finance managers need an accurate view on what is driving costs to be able to quickly take corrective actions when needed, while pricing teams need to set prices based on accurate cost and margin information.

In this webinar, we will share leading company insights on cost and profitability management as well as share KPMG’s related point of view on the following questions:

• What are the current trends and key challenges companies experience when performing costing?
• How can companies further improve their costing capabilities?
• What benefits are companies achieving from increasing their costing maturity level?

Our global insights will be supported by a practical business case.

To enable and sustain lasting change, a formal change management effort is integral to any significant project a company undertakes. Our approach allows organizations to increase the speed and success rate of change implementations. Whether the change is focused on a specific function or at an organization-wide level, changes in corporate strategy, processes, systems, and technology require that people perform and behave differently.

In this webinar, we will address the people aspects of moving towards a digital finance organization. There are three main topics we discuss talent management, managing constant change, and culture and team dynamics.