CFOs Zero In on ‘What Matters’ When Plotting Digital Transformation

During the turbulence of the last couple of years, businesses have had to look at their processes and make hard decisions about how to improve them.

“The pandemic really forced you to focus on what matters,” Eric Emans, chief financial officer at Nintex, told PYMNTS.

At his company and other vendors, that’s meant rethinking relationships with customers and other software makers, providing integrations that allow best-in solutions to work well together — and with companies’ workflows.

These trends bolster the work of Nintex, a supplier of process management and automation software. Emans joined the organization in April.

Transforming the Way People Work

In the CFO and finance leadership roles he’s held, Emans has seen how process intelligence and automation can transform the way people work together.

To get things done, organizations must either make people more efficient or get more people in the building — which may be difficult during the Great Resignation.

“It’s really taking the opportunity to say, ‘Where do we want our gray matter focused? It’s very expensive, it’s one of our most important assets, how do we free that up?’”

The right software can make teams such as human resources, information technology and finance simplify back-office tasks without having to tap developer talent that could be better deployed creating customer-focused solutions.

Bringing Information Into Systems

This can reap dividends for accounts payable (AP), where the hardest part is getting information into an organization’s system so that it can be routed for all the approvals, Emans said. This includes getting it coded into departments and getting allocations done in cases where there are licenses.

“I think about it as, how do we more easily bring the information into our system and then, once it’s in our system, how do we route it most effectively to get things into the right cost centers, get the right approval and then get it paid timely?” Emans said.

Accounts receivable (AR) teams, meanwhile, can apply automation to streamlining the collections process. While nearly every financial system can send an automatic email letting a customer know they haven’t paid, a better process will differentiate between a high-value customer and a transactional customer and take a different tack with each.

“Anytime that we’re talking to a client — including invoicing — we’re making an impression on that client,” Emans said. “So, when I think about how we can get better about it on the AR side, it’s making sure that our approach to collection actually matches the person we’re talking to.”

Improving Processes Along the Way

Beyond getting the processes in place, organizations should also measure the how effective they are — and how employees are spending their time. For example, on the AR side, organizations might use metrics such as days sales outstanding (DSO) to identify room for improvement.

“It’s not only how do we learn from it, but what is our process actually telling us about our process, and therefore how do we improve that process as we go along the way,” Emans said. “That’s what I think the pandemic has forced us all to do.”