How Collaborating with Finance Supports Good Decisions
In today’s relationship-oriented business environment, who you know and how you work with them are as important as anything you do. Collaboration is just as essential to finance as it is in naturally “creative” functions such as sales and marketing.
When I first started this series of posts, I mentioned that it was in response to the thoughts Kelly Barner shared on procurement’s hierarchy of needs: first savings, then compliance, moving on to risk and finally — collaboration. So, for procurement, savings is the most fundamental need. No other goals or objectives can realistically be addressed unless the organization’s spend is being efficiently negotiated and managed.
CFO’s Bread and Butter: Compliance & Risk
Thanks for joining our series of posts comparing how factors such as timing and cost are seen differently by finance, procurement and legal.
Compliance and risk are no different. While procurement may see compliance and risk management as being a few rungs up their strategic maturity ladder, for finance — and legal, I might add — they are the bedrock of our existence in the organization. If a CFO isn’t focused on ensuring compliance and risk management, he or she isn’t going to be in that job for very long.
Timing is everything to a CFO, as they say, so let’s talk about the importance of timing in finance.
It probably goes without saying that accuracy is the bedrock of sound financial decisions. At the same time, often the pace of business requires finance to make decisions before influencing circumstances become certainties. As a CFO, my confidence in each decision is tied to how far into the future I have to project data in order to make a judgement call.
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When you’re a CFO – no matter what company you happen to work for – it’s hard not to take a straight line finance perspective. As the CFO of Determine, I’m constantly faced with the challenge of balancing the requirements of finance and accounting with the needs of procurement and legal. After all, they are our customers too.
Managing procurement for three vastly different retail models. Amazon recently announced that they will open a “traditional” grocery chain. This is in addition to their 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods and their experimentation with Amazon Go, a fully automated (i.e. cashier-less) convenience store-style market. All three will meet a similar kind of consumer need, just […]
Agile & Strategic Wins the Race In the not too distant future, quick and dirty financial gains will no longer be the only value-creation lever considered to evaluate buyers and their performance. So long Savings…the new challenge facing buyers will be the multiplication and diversity of the objectives and KPIs to which they will be […]
Introducing… Determine, a Corcentric company. Last week, Determine (yes, that’s us!) was officially acquired by Corcentric. Founded in 1998 and based out of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Corcentric is a leader in procurement and finance solutions that strives to provide a competitive advantage to organizations, enabling them to reduce the cost of growth and, in […]
Determine OutLoud: A conversation with Sophie Pope, Director of Customer Success at Determine In a recent webinar, Sophie Pope and Ollie Young, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Determine, addressed The 5 Ways a S2P Platform Helps Create More Value for Your Organization. They discussed the differences between source-to-pay point solutions, platforms, and what they called […]
