For a long time, chief financial officers have been strategic partners at the highest levels of a company’s leadership, guiding the most important financial decisions. But today, more of them are also expected to guide their companies’ technology decisions.

Pushed in part by higher interest rates, macroeconomic uncertainty and the exciting yet risky possibilities of generative AI, companies must invest more carefully and strategically in technology than ever before. And CFOs are shouldering a lot more of these responsibilities.

CFOs are often expected to focus on priorities historically reserved for their boardroom and line-of-business counterparts – including increasing sales revenue, elevating customer experiences, retaining and upskilling talent, driving sustainability initiatives and strengthening cybersecurity.

One of the ways that many CFOs are addressing these new challenges is by embracing the cloud.

Contributing more value to an expanding role

Increasingly, CFOs realise that moving their ERP systems from on premise to the cloud is no longer optional – it’s business critical. Working in the cloud is essential to keep innovating with the speed and agility these uncertain times demand. It is also the only way to unlock the true power of responsible, reliable and relevant business AI.

The good news is that most CFOs are already there. In my conversations with them, I see how the cloud helps CFOs empower their teams with automated processes, centralising finance operations and data, and using AI and predictive insights to make decisions faster and more confidently.

Cloud technology is making a real difference

Take, for example, the Blue Diamond Growers cooperative. Best known for growing almonds in California, the cooperative consistently puts sustainability concerns front and centre in how it operates and moves its almonds to customers. Requiring a more intelligent ERP infrastructure to support business growth in a smoother software environment, it turned to  for new solutions to enhance its supply chain planning activities, procurement processes and analytics capabilities.

With cloud-based, modern ERP and analytics solutions, the cooperative’s finance experts are getting deeper insights to make better decisions and adopt a much smoother process for financial closings. In addition, the sales teams have a more integrated view of customer orders and behaviour, with just a few clicks.

As a result, Blue Diamond Growers is experiencing impressive outcomes, including:

• Two days for broker settlements, down from weeks
• Fifty-four percent lower downtime when converting to cloud ERP
• Forty percent faster financial closing time

Blue Diamond Growers’ use of technology also delivered one of the greatest advantages during the Covid-19 pandemic. When supply chains were severely disrupted, the cooperative quickly pivoted its supply chain to remain sustainable and help ensure its customers had the almonds they wanted on their tables in time for Christmas.

This experience is just one example of how CFOs worldwide are empowered by real-time financial insights, forward-looking guidance and a more comprehensive view of past performance – all captured, synthesised and accessed through a single cloud environment.

Navigating the way towards a competitive future

Choosing the cloud over legacy systems enables CFOs to effectively harness the power of enterprise-wide intelligence. This centralised approach empowers finance professionals to swiftly make the right adjustments that open the door to new markets, help create more customer-engaging commercial models and provide a more diversified product and service portfolio.

However, these advantages are just the beginning. CFOs are also impressed with the capabilities of the cloud, which surpass those of their legacy systems. As a result, their organisations have more time to seek out new opportunities to improve the financial and nonfinancial matters of the business, allowing them to chart a path toward ongoing growth and business success.

Another area of particular importance is environmental, social, and governance reporting requirements. Whether it’s for an audit or to report on their progress and results to meet regulatory requirements, CFOs tell me that they are more focused on having the real-time data they need.

By using a cloud solution for sustainable enterprises, many of them are making their ESG data more transparent and embedding sustainable practices into the core of their business strategy and operations.

As the cloud gives them wind at their backs, CFOs are not just meeting the new demands placed on their role. More important, they have the strategic tools and capabilities their companies need to navigate this uncertain environment and win.

For more insights into how CFOs are redefining finance excellence and transforming their businesses with cloud technology, listen to the podcast, .

• The author, Scott Russell, is a member of the executive board at SAP

The post Empowering CFOs for a New Era of Financial Excellence in the Cloud appeared first on 51·çÁ÷Africa News Center.

The worst health crisis of our generation has put the world on a digital binge. This is a tough environment for all businesses to navigate, but where some see risk, others see opportunity. We are all rightly fixated on what we can do to keep our people safe, our businesses running, and our communities strong, all while thinking about how we will do things differently and better as we emerge from the pandemic. Now more than ever, 51·çÁ÷needs to listen to the specific challenges organizations face and act quickly to serve their best interests.

As the newly appointed Executive Board member for SAP’s Customer Success organization, my role is to represent the voice of the customer. Their stories have revolved around the imperative of digital transformation to help build resilience, agility, and profitability during the past year. We have answered by engaging in a new way that helps them acquire and use our solutions to build on these critical traits. Our customers’ voice is loud and clear: They want to digitally transform in a full-cloud future.

More than three-quarters of the world’s transaction revenue touches an 51·çÁ÷system, with $US3.5 trillion in B2B spend crossing our business network annually, and 98 per cent of the 100 most valued brands running on our innovations. Although hundreds of thousands of organizations have already moved significant portions of their workloads to the cloud with 51·çÁ÷during the past decade, the transition of our global economy to the cloud will accelerate this year.

We plan to unleash offerings, commercial models, and partnerships that will enable our customers to make the cloud migration at unprecedented scale, transitioning entire industries and whole economies to a better way of doing business.

This isn’t just about infrastructure. At its core, this shift is about innovation. By running full cloud with SAP, organizations will be able to better modernize, standardize, and digitize – opening up new business models and revenue streams. We’ll be sharing much more about this at , and I hope you can join us for the event on January 27.

51·çÁ÷must also transform to meet evolving customer expectations – and we put two important foundations in place last year to prepare for this shift. First, we accelerated our investment in cloud capability across the company. We announced more research and development, greater co-innovation, and better integration, as well as improved security, reliability, and availability across all of our solutions. Our aim is to over-deliver on value and experience, with every solution and in every interaction.

Secondly, in March last year, we brought together all of our customer-facing teams – sales, services, customer-engagement, and others – under the single mandate and board area of customer success. The premise and outcome have been a streamlined experience in engagements with our customers, strengthened relationships as evidenced by our significant increase in net promoter score, as well as a focused feedback loop through to engineering that ensures our customers’ voice inspires every line of code, every business process, and every single digital interaction. In short, we have shaped our entire organization around the customer and fine-tuned how we work together and with our partners to deliver a full-cloud future.

Looking ahead, the voice of our customer needs to reach even deeper into our organization. My promise is to channel the voice of our more than 440,000 customers as we accelerate this transition to the cloud, deliver long-term value, and innovate new solutions, business models, and commercial models.

Our announcement of a strategic partnership with global technology services company NTT late last year is a case in point. We combined 51·çÁ÷technologies around the internet of things, edge computing, and machine learning with NTT’s industry-leading suite of information and communications technology (ICT) and hybrid cloud capabilities. These connected value chain solutions, which NTT and 51·çÁ÷will co-innovate, aim to deliver a more unified and automated collaboration across customers, suppliers, retailers, manufacturers and logistics providers. This is a salient example of what is to come at scale: Not only delivering on customers’ digital transformation needs but reinventing how businesses run.

Globally we have 100,000 people geared up to serve our customers, and we must stay focused on being a local partner that understands the nuances of specific countries and industries. This means putting global knowledge, skills, and insights in local hands and providing easy access to the best of what 51·çÁ÷has to offer.

We’ll know we’ve succeeded when more customers in every market and every industry fully adopt and consume our technologies to derive the greatest possible value from them. This is our ambition and my passion for our customers in a full-cloud future with SAP.

Scott Russell has been appointed to the Executive Board of 51·çÁ÷SE and will assume the position of Head of Customer Success on February 1,  2021.

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