Teaser: Finance Transformation Summit 2016

The Finance Transformation and Shared Services Summit will be held in Sydney commencing Wednesday this week.

I'm thrilled to be opening Day 2 with Paul Pemberton (DB Schenker) and Andrew Sharrock (Financial Controller - ANZ) with a stream aimed at improving operational insights and unlocking value through automation.

As Head of Management Accounting at AHG, I lead Business Transformation projects across the portfolio of companies. My session will give insights on how to lay a foundation for a Finance Transformation project that is so strong that once you get started there will be no stopping success, no matter what external dark forces might throw at you.

I’m going to select learnings from 3 key transformation projects at AHG to show step by step how to:

- Get started from a position of strength; - Identify and avoid project killers; and - Embrace a digital methodology so that small failures don’t mean the end of your project.

Here is a brief summary of the key points of my presentation:

How to kick-start an automation project in your business

For this section I draw on our T&E (travel and expenses) centralisation project and Concur implementation.

To communicate the merit of this project and get the mandate to proceed we did the following:

- Conduct Analysis

- Identify Best Practice

- Deliver a fact based hypothesis with a tangible $ saving

How to identify and avoid Project Killers

Once you have a mandate and the resources to proceed with a project, how do you identify and defend against Project killers that might arise?

For this topic I draw on experiences from accounts payable automation projects that are underway in the business. Through this lens we identified three types of Project Killers:

- Powerful Hostiles

- Priority Clash

- Implementation Burn out

To varying degrees of success, my team also developed various methods to overcome these Project Killers, including:

- Pre-wire Communications

- Align from the top down

- Gain visible wins and create advocates

How to embrace digital thinking to ensure a successful implementation

In this section, I highlight implementation tricks that embrace small failures and how to ensure they don’t mean the end of your project.

Here I cover the following key points:

- Automation isn’t always the first answer - Don’t bite off more than you can chew - Create a lean model first

I will post a full review and slide deck at the conclusion of the event, keep in touch at www.innovateyourself.com.au