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The changing role of the CFO in a post-Covid-19 world

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The changing role of the CFO in a post-Covid-19 world

The changing role of the CFO in a post-Covid-19 world

Pre-Covid-19, CFOs primarily focused on reporting historical financial performance. But today, with rising logistics costs, supply chain bottlenecks, escalating input costs, and the uncertainty of sales, developing a forward-looking perspective is a must, write Chee Wee Teo, Huan Gao and Adam Mokhtee from Alvarez & Marsal.

In the months and years ahead, the CFO role must significantly evolve to keep up with the ever-changing Covid-19 environment. To be successful in the role, CFOs need to apply predictive thinking, adopt a greater strategic view, and increase their focus on forward risk assessment and contingency planning.

Develop a forward-looking perspective

Traditionally, finance teams spent 80% of their time on reporting results and 20% of their time on forecasting. In a Covid and post-Covid world, that ratio needs to shift toward a forward-looking approach that will better prepare companies to respond to unexpected events.

With this new approach, the CFO’s conversations with the CEO and the board will center on what could happen in the future. For the CFO who is accustomed to relying on historical data, this may be an uncomfortable transition, but it’s vital for the changing role of the effective CFO.

Digitize the finance function

Although digitizing processes has always been necessary for efficiency, the digitization offorecasting has become especially crucial. Leveraging digitization for predictive analytics can help anticipate challenges ahead and allow companies to stress test their business plans.

In some companies, the CFO manages the finance team while the Chief Digital Officer leads the data analytics effort. We strongly encourage the finance function to collaborate with data analytics so that the CFO can develop a predictive, forward-looking view of where the business can go.

The following should be digitization focus areas:

Customer focus:

Build a profile of key customers, their cadence in ordering products, consumption pattern and liquidity situation.

Production and inventory management:

Establish a robust production system (that captures the right production costs) all the way through to an effective sales fulfillment (that delivers the right product to customers at the right time witminimal production waste and inventory leftover). These interdependent processes are typically filled with manual touchpoints and subject to human judgement. This can be significantly augmented with digital tools to drive optimization.

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Technology’s Role in Managing the Evolution of the Customer Centric Supply Chain

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Having an effective supply chain has always been key to retail success. Whether you call it micro-merchandising or the customer-centric supply chain, the challenge has traditionally been to quickly identify trends or activity in a store that is outperforming the norm, and rapidly roll this out to all stores with similar attributes and customer behaviours. Indeed, much of the ‘flair’ that separated well- from poorly performing retail operators was down to the ability of some key individuals to spot trends, clusters and patterns that drove better understanding of customer behaviour, and act upon these insights to deliver to customers’ demands.

This macro-level insight is, however, no longer good enough. Today, retailers need to be able to understand not only how items are performing across the entire retail estate as well as within individual stores and spot trends and patterns accordingly; they also need to be able to marry this micro-level performance to geographic and demographic information to reflect the demand from a particular store’s customers. And, they need to be able to forecast how those same items will be performing in weeks and months to come.

This is the capability that is required to truly deliver today’s customer-centric supply chain. But it demands a level of detail simply too difficult for humans to manage. Software solutions are designed to raise the average performance level by helping the poor or below average operators benefit from the expertise of the higher performers and placing this supporting technology in the hands of those key individuals who would act as district or regional manager.

But the needs of today’s customer-centric supply chain have outpaced even the majority of these solutions.

Read more Technology’s Role in Managing the Evolution of the Customer Centric Supply Chain

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