Modernize Finance Analytics
By itself data is not useful for business. It requires analytics to transform data into actionable information. Analytics of one sort or another has long been a core competence of finance departments, applied to balance sheets, income statements or cash flow statements. But today, Finance—especially in manufacturing organizations—must go beyond these basics by expanding the scope of the data being examined to bring together financial and operational information that can yield actionable insights. For example, data from the systems that manage sales operations, human resources, and manufacturing and distribution must be available for analysis and to all departments and applications that need it.
By being applied to broad, diverse sets of data, analytics can provide richer performance measures that offer executives and managers deep insights into how well the business is doing and why. But it must give them the ability to look forward, providing more accurate forecasts and early alerts to enable decision-makers to address issues and opportunities sooner and receive better guidance on what to do next.