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CFO Advisory Services helps leaders of finance departments shift resources from transaction processing and other low-value activities to high-value business analysis. First we redesign, automate and outsource processes to focus more resources on critical business analyses. Then, we improve how you perform business analysis by unifying strategy, goal setting, budgeting, reporting and analysis activities with tools and best practices. More time and better analysis will increase your identification of new opportunities with customers, vendors, business units, operations, and other vital areas creating more value across the entire company.
Process Improvement, Software, and Outsourcing
To be more effective, the finance function must eliminate labor-intensive transactions and transaction processing. This is accomplished by delivering improvement programs that achieve cost efficiencies, improved output quality and faster processing- cycle times. These improvements reducing the time finance staff spend on low-value activities, enabling a shift of focus to high-value analysis activities and a role as a strategic business partner. Samples of the capabilities we provide to help you make this strategic shift are:
- Finance Optimization Assessment and Implementation: benchmark, streamline and redesign your processes and, when appropriate, automate tasks. Improvement options range from radical process redesign to outsourcing. Processes that may be included on a case-by-case basis are:
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Closing of the Accounting Books
- Reporting
- Budgeting
- Payroll
- Purchasing
- Shared Services
- IT Management
- Software Selection and Implementation: develop requirements for traditional or hosted applications, and perform vendor identification and selection ensuring that your system meets the needs of your industry and your vision for the future. Use experts in planning, execution, and operation so that your system is implemented correctly and cost effectively the first time.
- Outsourcing: focus on your most important customer-related aspects of your business, and identify and select vendors that can provide world-class capabilities to your non-core business areas in a seamless way.
Business Performance Management and Reporting
Business Performance Management (BPM) greatly reduces the time spent on gathering and consolidating planning, budgeting, actual and operational data by seamlessly integrating the disconnected information and activities of financial processes. A unified BPM solution allows you to minimize low value compilation and reconciliation activities and spend more time on valuable analysis to improve business performance. A sample of how Blum Shapiro Consulting can improve your business performance management includes:
- Finance Strategy Alignment: clearly articulate and document how your finance organization will advance and measure the corporate strategy and the initiatives and activities it will perform to deliver on strategic, financial, and operational goals and objectives.
- Efficient and Integrated Strategy, Planning, Budgeting, Analysis, and Reporting: eliminate the frustration of complicated, disconnected software, and the limitations, time and labor involved in spreadsheet-based business planning and analysis. Rapidly streamline data collection and report on your financial and operational data from multiple systems, business units, product/service lines and geographies.
- Business Intelligence: fully understand your organization's current information needs and available market solutions to develop requirements and scenarios specific to your business that will effectively evaluate different technologies and service offerings. Implement the solution with a partner who has invested their time and energy into understanding your business and who provides the depth and breadth of skills to ensure a smooth rollout.
Cost and Revenue Analysis
Move away from the traditional role of historian, and maximize the inherent analytical strengths of finance to help you solve problems, gain marketplace advantage and, most of all, directly support business objectives. Some of the value-added analysis performed by Blum Shapiro include:
- Expenditure Analysis: opportunities to reduce costs are often missed because indirect expenditures are not a focus and financial systems do not provide a procurement perspective. Analyze indirect spending and benefit from price and demand management opportunities that result in cost reduction.
- Finance Diagnostic: get meaningful benchmark information on finance organizations of emerging and mid-sized businesses and best practices that pinpoint for you specific areas for business improvement.
- Activity Based Costing: to ascertain the true performance of a line of business or other cost objective, calculate the real cost of your organization's production and support by analyzing the time spent by people in the front and back office and vendor expenditures. Some key cost objects and drivers that can be analyzed are:
- Products / Services
- Existing Customers
- New Customers
- Business Units
- Facilities
- Departments
- Information Technology
- General and Administrative Costs
- Cost Benefit Analysis: closely scrutinize the pros and cons of your project or capital expenditure to determine if it meets internal hurdle rates, and more importantly, fits with corporate strategy. We quantify for you the benefits and costs and identify risks to customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders so the right decision is made and supported.
- Business Modeling: perform in depth analysis of existing or new businesses to determine the impact on your revenues, profitability, headcount, or other key measures that would result from changes in your pricing, expenditures, channels, projects, personnel, or environmental factors.
Risk Management
The ability to analyze discrete risks, especially risk that implies financial liability, is already a core competency of finance. Finance is now being asked to go further and integrate the management of business risk, financial risk, operational risk, and risk transfer to maximize shareholder value requiring a delicate balance between risk control, the pursuit of new opportunities, and compliance with new regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbanes-Oxley has increased the expectations on management and boards of directors of privately held companies, governmental agencies, and non-profit organizations to understand and improve internal controls. The heightened focus on risks and internal controls places a heavy burden on you to understand, plan, and implement intensive new programs. Blum Shapiro is in a position to help you with its risk mitigation capabilities including but not limited to:
- Risk Identification and Categorization: work closely with the leaders of HR, IT, Legal departments to understand what it means to you if there is a significant event and the effect on revenue, reputation, and operations to find the risks that otherwise might have slipped through the cracks. Now that you know the risks to your business, evaluate their severity, likelihood, type and mitigation.
- Risk Mitigation Planning: put in place processes, procedures, and internal controls that mitigate identified risks and implement a plan and monitoring program to validate that these risk mitigation techniques are currently operating effectively and that they will continue to do so in the future.
- Corporate Compliance and Internal Audit: develop, operate, and monitor corporate compliance programs so you can have confidence that you are taking the right steps to steer through a continually changing business, regulatory, and risk environment.
- Process and Controls Assessment: document and evaluate internal controls so that weaknesses can be addressed and, if key personnel losses occur, institutional knowledge exists so training can be performed and operations will not grind to a halt.
- Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance: comply with both sections 302, Officer Certification, and 404, Management Assessment of Internal Controls, by working with Blum Shapiro's financial statement auditor to enable rapid attestation to management's assessment of your control environment with Blum Shapiro's clearly independent role, eliminating the perception of conflict of interest.
Call us to learn more
Our CFO Advisory Services are customized to your organization's needs. We welcome the opportunity to talk with you about how our CFO Advisory Services can help to transform your finance organization to provide more value and contribute to improved business performance.
David A. Putt
Blum Shapiro Consulting
29 South Main Street
P.O. Box 272000
West Hartford, CT 06127-2000
860-561-4000
dputt@blumshapiro.com
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