CFO Studio magazine with Todd McElhatton

cfostudio.com 9 T o understand how the Finance organization role has changed in today’s digital age, we recently interviewed JimLusk, CFO, andTimLeger, SVP Business Process Transformation, for Sutherland, a digital process transformation company headquartered inRochester, NY. Sutherland’s focus is on improving the customer experience and deliveringmeaningful andmeasurable business outcomes to clients. Lusk andLeger provide a unique perspective, bringing insights froma company’s CFOas well as froma business leader responsible for partneringwith primarily small and mediumbusinesses to transformand automate their Finance operations. Jimstarted by sharing that, as CFO, his ultimate goal is “to become a strategic partner to the business.” To achieve this, his top priority is tomake “the Finance organizationmore agile, forward- looking and decision-centric to address stakeholders’ growing demands for access to the right information, at the right time, tomake the right decisions.With the right data and business insights, he said, “you can really beat your competition.Themost important question you need to ask is, ‘What information dowe have that is not being used that can help the business run better?’ ” Transformation Journey Jim, like most CFOs, shares a passion for improving business operations, and recently completed a “multiyear end-to-end intelligent transformation” of Sutherland’s entire Finance organization. It included implementing a new ERP system along with digital technologies and an analytics platform. The results are notewor- thy. The 50 percent operating cost savings are impressive, but the true benefits, Jim pointed out, were the “business outcomes delivered and improved controls and compliance.” The department’s process transformation signifi- cantly improved cash flow by reducing DSO (days sales outstanding) to world-class levels. By rethinking and digitizing its transaction activities, the close was reduced from 22 calen- dar days to 7, leaving time to analyze results as opposed to just reporting them. Themost important result was significant improvement in customer satisfaction, achieved by automating the billing process. Automation improved accuracywhile at the same time reducing cycle time from80 hours to less than 8 hours. Jimadmitted the significant advantage he had was a built-in partner, Tim’s F&A transformation team.They have 8,000 finance professionals working with clients to create next-generation Finance organizations. Timshared that amajority of small- to-mediumbusinesses, even some Fortune 500 companies, lack the skills and investments required to truly transformtheir Finance operations. An interesting statistic he quotedwas that “more than 50 percent of companies that try this themselves fail. The primary reason is that they lack the required automation experience, and there is a shortage of those skills in themarket.My organization has that expertise to accelerate automation and takes on the risk of delivering the results.” Finance Transformed WHEN CFOS ASK, ‘WHAT CAN I GET OUT OF THIS DATA?’ SUTHERLAND CAN HELP THEM PUT THE RELEVANT INFORMATION TO WORK IN THEIR BUSINESSES FASTER Jim Lusk, CFO Tim Leger, SVP Business Process Transformation

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