Limitless leaders: How automation taps into CFO ambition

By Adrian Johnston

While the theory that we only use 10% of our brain has been dismissed as a myth, many of us have been willing to embrace it as a truth because we know only too well that we fail to achieve our full potential so much of the time. Whether that’s spending only four hours of our working day actually being productive or knowing our capacity for making good decisions dwindles significantly as the day goes on, being human means we’re all burdened with certain limits. Limits we often believe stand in the way of us reaching our true, unbridled potential. So, how to maximise our talents during our peak periods and, ultimately, achieve as much as we possibly can? 

This conundrum is why we’re starting to see more business leaders – especially CFOs – turn to ERP solutions with embedded artificial intelligence to both free up and maximise their time, helping make the best use of the productive hours they have available. 

When you consider that these leaders, like the rest of us, can only make a limited number of good choices in a day, then why waste that head space on manual tasks and lower level decisions? To thrive in a demanding business landscape, organisations need their leaders to be pushing themselves where it matters, focusing as much as possible on the bigger picture and going above and beyond in their mission to get the business strategy correct. We need these people to be limitless with what they can achieve; and adding artificial intelligence or even chatbot assistants to their ERP applications to handle less strategic work the game-changer, helping them do just that. 

After all, CFOs are ambitious by nature. But, unfortunately, they’re still spending a lot of their productive hours doing tasks that simply keep the finance function up and running. Requisitions, purchase orders and vendor invoicing won’t go away. But, when cloud-based ERP with automation comes with the intelligent financial management capabilities to handle these routine duties, it frees CFOs up from doing them. Brainpower during their more productive hours can there be spent tapping into their ambition and, ultimately, showing their CEO just how valuable a right-hand advisor they can be. 

There’s never been a better opportunity to do this than right now. Our heads of finance are in a privileged position, among an elite few with access to data pertaining to all parts of the business. 

This is especially the case as regulations and compliance laws become stricter, resulting in different business units, even within one company, putting access to their own individual data sets on lock-down. And, if you’re one of the few people with a true oversight of connected data and processes in an age where businesses are driven by data? You need to ensure you’re taking every chance to make use of it. 

More CFOs need to free themselves to take advantage of this position, applying their productive hours and good decision-making capacity to the data they have at their disposal. After all, it’s this insight that’s empowering the valuable guidance they can give the CEO and help to drive the business forward. 

Tapping into this ambition and becoming a strategic guide can manifest itself in a number of ways, as explored in an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report sponsored by Oracle. 

In it, Rachel Grimes, CFO of technology, transformation and operations at Australian bank Westpac, explains that the finance function should maintain oversight of all of the business’ units, in order to avoid a weakening of the enterprise-wide digital strategy. 

As finance is starting to master the use of emerging technologies such as AI, predictive analytics and blockchain, Rachel believes that the insights they can gather will inspire other parts of the business on how they can use the very same techniques to provide more valuable insights and better customer service to external customers. 

Jim Boland, CFO at Singapore’s leading online supermarket RedMart, has moved to an ERP cloud for swifter and more efficient financial processes. He can now close the company’s books in just three days, whereas the process used to take his team a whole week. He can now spend time focusing on using financial information for business strategy, rather than processing the reports, or even running system maintenance. 

Asia Commercial Bank, meanwhile, has moved to an ERP Cloud to modernise its business processes and capitalise on the software to achieve speed, agility and accuracy. With intelligent cloud-based applications, the bank’s CFO can gather real-time data and spend their time using these insights to build key strategies for the business.

We want to see more CFOs following suit, maximising their potential and shifting their position to become more strategic and help with the running of their organisation as a whole. With 80% of an organisation’s transactions processed in the back office, there’s a big opportunity to digitally transform and make the most of being more data-driven and automated. 

CFOs will find themselves even more central to the organisation. But this isn’t a burden – it’s giving ambitious CFOs a chance to shine. And they need to make sure they’re in a position to take that chance right now. 

The time has come to showcase their abilities by taking advantage of intelligent process automation, which can handle the labour-intensive tasks so they can make themselves limitless during their most productive hours, finding the insights that will help them put their head – and, indeed, their organisation – above the parapet. 

An ERP Cloud with strong financial functionality baked into its automation is the way they can push these limits, taking care of the lower-level tasks for them, so they can focus their attention instead on showing off their real value in building a successful business. 

(The writer is Senior Vice President of Cloud (SaaS) Applications at Oracle Asia Pacific.)