Historically, the emphasis has been on leveraging trusted information to understand and communicate the state of the business (hindsight), and helping to anticipate where the business is going (foresight). That’s no longer enough. In light of today’s multi-faceted challenges, CFOs must help uncover hidden opportunities and risks.
Over 80% of Finance teams expect to use analytics to drive performance, manage risk/compliance and optimize processes within two years
Those industry leaders that have adopted analytics, have delivered better financial performance than their peers – in both revenue growth and profitability, and were more effective than their peers in the following Finance-focused activities:
1. Cash forecasting
2. Expense management
3. Finance process optimization
4. Financial planning
5. Management reporting
6. Mergers and acquisitions
7. Order-to-cash
8. Procurement
9. Profitability and margin analysis
10. Revenue forecasting.
So where do Finance organizations specifically want to invest in cognitive computing?
Research respondents identified that the cognitive computing priorities for Finance are on both efficiency and insights.
• To increase efficiency, 48 percent expect to invest in Finance process optimization and 35 percent in expense management.
• To obtain greater insights, they plan to invest in management reporting (45 percent), financial planning and budgeting (38 percent), and revenue forecasting (37 percent).
Read more about this in this whitepaper titled “The CFO mission to uncover the unknown: Applying analytics and cognitive computing for efficiency and insight.”.