Empowering CFOs to drive enterprise-wide performance

If there was one takeaway from the latest CFO Magazine Lunchtime Live webinar, it’s that the finance function has firmly stepped out of the back office. CFOs are now expected to be the architects of enterprise-wide performance – not just keeping the score, rather shaping the playbook itself.

Hosted by James Solomons, Group CFO at Encore Group Holdings, the discussion brought together three leaders who are doing exactly that: Adam Leake, CFO of PeopleIN, Nick Potts, Director at Cortell Australia, and Darksha Nadeswaran, CFO Consulting for IBM ANZ.

Over the course of an hour, they unpacked how modern enterprise performance management (EPM) platforms are supercharging agility and decision-making at scale.

Turning fragmented systems into unified insight

When Adam Leake joined PeopleIN – Australia’s largest workforce-solutions group, spanning 15 brands, 4,000 clients and 15,000 people on payroll each week – he immediately saw the complexity that comes with growth through acquisition.

“Our teams and our brands were quite fragmented,” Leake said. “How they operated was siloed and [it was] a really overcomplicated approach to finance. The business didn’t understand why it was successful, let alone why things had changed. We had to get data – and get data quick. We had to put it in front of leaders so they could make really good decisions right now.”

That sense of urgency led PeopleIN to deploy Cortell’s CoreEPM, built on IBM Planning Analytics, to deliver a single source of truth across 79 business units – a project that went live in just eight weeks.

“PeopleIN did most of the configuration themselves within a six-week period,” Potts said. “We assisted with system connectivity, data ingestion and mentoring of how to use the system, but fundamentally they had an internal champion that took it by the scruff of the neck and they were able to do all the work themselves. With executive dashboards for the right people [they can] see everything that’s going on inside the business.”

For Leake, the payoff was immediate. Reporting cycles shrank from 15 days to three, monthly packs went from 100+ pages to real-time dashboards and the cultural impact was just as influential.

“The CEO’s tapping me on the shoulder all the time because he can see the numbers as quickly as I can,” he said. “We’re making decisions differently.”

A single version of the truth – at global scale

For Nadeswaran, whose remit spans IBM’s consulting arm across Australia and New Zealand while reporting into global finance leadership, consistency of data is non-negotiable.

“Globally, EPM replaced around 300 different reporting and data applications within IBM and consolidated 70,000 reporting types into a unified environment,” she said. “What EPM does is – no matter if I’m a sector person and you’re a service line person – we’re all getting the same data, no matter where we pull it from. That’s important because when I joined IBM, it was very different – finance people would spend time agreeing on what the real information was before we’d get to the next step of analysing it or having a recommendation.”

The change, she added, means finance can focus on recommendations rather than reconciliation: “Our time to actually work on roadmaps and recommendations was much lower than what it is now, because we’re not questioning what is the right data.”

The rise of out-of-the-box transformation

Potts believes the appetite for this kind of transformation has only accelerated since the pandemic.

“Organisations are now looking for fast, low-cost but sophisticated products – things that can deliver 80 to 90 per cent of their core requirements out of the box,” he said. “No one has 12 to 18 months to wait in today’s economic uncertainties.”

That’s where CoreEPM – developed over 3,000 days of engineering and used by hundreds of Australian organisations – is changing the game. “Everything is automated, the risks are removed, and the very valuable gift of time is given back to the office of finance,” Potts said.

For Leake, that time dividend has been central to driving enterprise-wide engagement. He now writes his own reports when needed – a habit he says sends a strong signal to the wider organisation.

“Once they realise that the CFO is using this tool and using it in a very flexible way, they start to chip in too,” he said. “It brings this momentum and organisational change with it.”

Change management starts with champions

Every transformation needs believers. Potts emphasised that successful EPM adoption depends on recruiting an internal champion who owns the outcome.

“It’s not so much the core users within the office of finance […] because they’re already feeling the pain,” he said. “It’s often the people, even on the periphery of that, who have been using their Excel spreadsheet for five years. Having a senior executive like Adam directing and owning the outcome is very important.”

Nadeswaran agreed, adding that identifying the right peer-level advocates can help overcome any initial resistance: “Pick someone who’s not necessarily a technical expert, but who’s curious, who’s interested in wanting to do things better and open to change. Have lunch-and-learns for those who are not seeing the value of it at the beginning, because there’s always some people who really don’t see value of change in the beginning.”

Beyond reporting

Asked which capabilities had delivered the most value, Leake didn’t hesitate; real-time understanding of performance and a move to rolling forecasts.

“For the first time in this business, we’re asking really hard questions of ourselves – when things are favourable just as much as when they’re unfavourable,” he said. “That has led the business naturally to an evolving, rolling forecasting-type approach. I’m the champion and president of the ‘I hate budgets’ club – no sooner have you pressed print, they’re out of date.”

Automating data collection has freed financial planning and analysis teams to redirect their focus to more value-added analysis, Potts said.

“It’s doing all the heavy lifting,” he said. “It’s capturing the data from the source systems. It’s aligning to your chart of accounts. It’s producing over 100 reports automatically. It’s giving you back that time to do other things.”

If the webinar proved anything, it’s that modern CFOs are much more than mere financial stewards. Rather, they’re builders of enterprise capability – and when they get it right, they can produce more clarity and speed, not to mention confidence, for the organisation at large. Which, in an age of heightening complexity, is more important than ever.

For further resources on how IBM & CorEPM support CFOs & Finance Teams visit:  www.Cortell.com.au/CoreEPM & https://www.ibm.com/products/planning-analytics/financial-planning-analysis