Several things have happened in the last few years to throw status quo into a tailspin. I don’t need to mention them here because there’s a good chance you’ve noticed – especially the part where, as a finance leader, you’ve been called upon to help continuously steer the overall strategy of your company (in addition, of course, to continuing to do the day-to-day work of managing every dime and dinar your company spends).
So yeah, things are changing. The real question here, however, is have you been able to change with them?
Notice that I said, “have you been able to change?”. Odds are, it’s not a lack of desire to keep up with the market fluctuations going on around you. No, if your organization is like many others, the issue is that your ERP or financial solutions aren’t agile enough to adapt to what feels like (and sometimes is) overnight change.
According to a recent Aberdeen Report entitled the “Backbone Behind Finance and Accounting Agility,” companies are realizing that on-premise solutions simply aren’t up to the task. And if you’re locked into these legacy systems, you see the evidence of their age and inflexibility every day:
Budgeting and forecasting take too much time and too many resources.
Business processes lag behind market volatility.
Changing customer demands are greater than your organization’s ability to change.
So where does that leave you? How are you supposed to change your business’s systems, processes, and policies fast enough to stay on top of the global changes that are forcing changes in the first place?
That’s the kind of question that’ll keep even the sharpest financial leaders staring at their ceilings all night. For the answer, look again to the Aberdeen Report. Or you can look right here: Cloud ERP. That’s the answer.
The answer: Cloud ERP
The top 20 percent of companies – your best-in-class peers – are 39 percent more likely to have adopted cloud ERP to speed up and simplify finance and accounting processes. What do they get for it? Faster, better data, which translates, of course, into faster, better decisions.
As it turns out, being able to think and move faster in the cloud helps these top-performing businesses perform even better. On average, these businesses are:
- 35 percent more likely to have better collaboration between finance and business units all over the company
- 40 percent more likely to have a standard workflow for decision making
- 52 percent more likely to be able to link performance to business processes.
Look deeper into the details, and you’ll see that cloud-based companies can move faster than their peers as well, with:
- 111 percent better time-to-decision.
- 111 percent faster cycle time.
Imagine having instant and accurate financial information that you could share with decision makers all over the company. How would your day-to-day tasks change if you could address issues immediately, instead of waiting for data to roll in? How would your ability to steer the company change if you were that informed and that agile? How do you look at results like those in the Aberdeen Report and ignore the changes you must make to compete?
Rest assured, among all the changes yet to come, making the move to cloud ERP is the kind of change you can live with. In fact, it may be the only way to survive.
