Finance functions must take on a demanding new role and become strategic partners to help organizations stay ahead of the competition and fulfill their missions. BCG works with CFOs and their teams to build a future-ready finance function.
Chief financial officers today grapple with a challenging mix of macroeconomic volatility, investor expectations, efficiency imperatives, digital opportunities, sustainability requirements, and shifting capability needs. The role of the finance function must broaden to unleash the power of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence and collaborate with business leaders to actively manage strategic planning, resource allocation, and value-driven performance.
We help CFOs and their teams in all industries enhance the role of the finance function and drive a finance function transformation anchored on four pillars:
Finance Vision and Strategy. We align the finance function targets and roadmap with future business needs. This entails defining a North Star and fundamentally rethinking finance strategy, organization, processes, technology, and people. Our CFO Excellence services include setting the agenda for incoming CFOs and guiding them on best practices and cutting-edge finance trends. Additionally, our finance function consulting team helps CFOs become chief performance officers, driving greater profitability in response to today's volatile business environment.
Finance Operating Model and Organization. We transform the finance function operating model to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness. This includes reshaping the talent strategy and organization structure, location and sourcing model, and ways of working. We support finance cost transformations by implementing actions that realize durable savings and ensure finance functions can increase focus on higher value-add activities. In post-merger management, we apply this approach to realize significant synergies and value-creation opportunities.
Digitization in Finance. The transition of the CFOs' role impacts their use of digital, moving from optimizing core functionality to supporting value creation in the business. To support this shift, we help define a robust digital strategy, including the use of generative AI and the next generation ERP strategy. We help our clients create their technology roadmap; identify advanced digital use cases; develop pilots and scaling them rapidly; and support them through the detailed design and implementation of new digital capabilities, such as financial planning and forecasting tools.
Financial Steering Excellence. We leverage AI and advanced analytics to help build world-class capabilities in performance steering—including revamping the budgeting and forecasting processes through automated, driver-based planning and enhanced decision support with next-generation business intelligence.
Our approach is one pillar of BCG’s corporate finance and strategy services that also includes:
An energy company worked with BCG to envision its future finance function. The revamped operating model introduced centers of excellence (including talent and digital) to drive best practices and continuous improvement; significantly increased the use of shared services; and allowed for leaner embedded finance teams to focus on enhanced decision support and partnership with the business. The finance function led the transformation of the overall enterprise in terms of speed and impact, driving $120 million in cost savings.
The CFO at a fashion and luxury store turned to BCG for help transforming its planning, forecasting, and business intelligence capabilities, including driver-based business logic, modern digital tooling with greater data automation, and streamlined planning and forecasting processes. As a result, finance and business leaders gained more real-time visibility into the drivers of performance and freed up 30% to 40% of the financial planning and analysis teams’ capacity to redeploy to business advisory and decision support.
BCG developed an AI- and machine-learning-based forecasting engine for a large industrial goods manufacturer. This new tool, based on vast internal and external data sets, improved the accuracy of revenue forecasts by 50% while drastically reducing variance and bias and providing better explainability into the drivers of demand. Better forecasting enabled $25 million to $40 million in efficiency improvements across business operations, through improved labor and production scheduling, procurement efficiencies, and better working capital.
BCG worked with a CFO of a global health care company to develop a vision for the finance function and to support its design and implementation. This included a radical rethink of the planning process, the agile operating model, and organizational design. As a result, the finance teams became more flexible and efficient, freeing up 20% to 30% of their capacity.
Our CFO Excellence Panel is BCG’s premium benchmarking tool that compares your finance function’s performance with detailed best practices of more than 800 peers from all industries and regions. It leverages quantitative and qualitative KPIs to give CFOs systematic insights into their function’s efficiency and effectiveness; transparency into the function’s relative strengths and weaknesses; and tailored, action-oriented advice on priorities promotes the achievement of step-change improvements.
As a member of the CFO Panel, your progress can be validated every year.
Contact the CFO Excellence Panel for more details
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Our finance function consulting team helps CFOs and finance leaders transform their finance function operating models to achieve higher efficiency and effectiveness, unleash the power of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, orchestrate companywide transformations to drive the corporate value agenda, and more. Here are some of our experts on this topic.
