A Business Partner Is Like A Mechanic, Always Looking To Optimize The Engine Room

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If you follow the debate on business partnering you might get the idea that it is a role for the selected few and that the rest of the finance roles have lost their value. You could not be more wrong! Business partnering is first and foremost a mindset for everyone in Finance to live and die by. 

Everyone in Finance must think like a business partner when it comes to realizing efficiencies across the value chain both inside and outside of Finance. It is about making time for work that matters by making everything else so efficient through for instance automation or process redesign. This frees up resources to growing the business. It is like a car mechanic who never builds new cars from scratch but rather seeks to optimize the existing assets to drive as best as possible.

How can we drive efficiencies? 

Let us first take a high-level view of what matters and why it is needed to drive efficiencies. This goes to your personal effectiveness as much as the company effectiveness. A good framework for this is Stephen Covey’s importance and urgency matrix.

This tells us that anything that is not important should either not be done or done differently. That will free up time for important tasks and make the company run in an efficient manner. Anyone in Finance, including the CFO, should be looking to drive efficiencies. How do we do this? There are four key paths to doing things more efficient. 

• Eliminate
• Redesign
• Delegate
• Outsource / offshoring (a different way of delegating) 

Eliminate

Is everything we do needed and create value for the shareholders of the company? Most likely not. Many of the activities we do are strictly speaking not necessary and we would argue that you can free up 5-10% of your time by simply stopping these activities.

A great example is the hundreds or even thousands of reports that are generated in companies every day. What do you think would happen if one day you just did not send or receive any reports? Would it be the end of the world or would you manage just as well? It is an interesting experiment and if nothing happens then you have already saved a good deal of time! 

Redesign

Most of the time we just do things the way we have always done them because it is already built into our routines. While there can be some value in that we should remember that the world changes rapidly around us and new technologies emerge all the time.

That is a major opportunity to redesign processes. Just think about what machine learning could do for your forecasting or bots for your accounts receivables queries. The potential is massive, and we must break our former habits to realize it. 

Delegate

We cannot be good at everything not even within our own domain. This holds true especially for leaders who tend to hold on to things for too long rather than delegating it to their team. It is also the case between a retained organization and the shared service centre when we are not willing to move on to the new tasks that we are assigned post an offshoring/outsourcing exercise. But just imagine a company where everyone does exactly what they are best at every day and do not waste their time. 

Offshore / outsource

In the past ten years, most offshoring or outsourcing exercises have been done from a labour arbitrage perspective. However, it has also become clear that it is a much more efficient way to run at least your finance operations but also reporting and analytics could be consolidated into a centre of excellence. There are many benefits to offshoring or outsourcing and not least that it helps you focus on work that really matters to you because you are the best at doing it. 

The one-day month-end close 

Anders has previously told the story of how he managed to cut two days off the month-end close process when he worked as a finance manager. This is a great example of how to create efficiencies and time for work that matters. Let us revisit this example through the lens of eliminate, redesign, delegate, and automate. 

• Eliminate: A lot of work was eliminated to make this work. The best example was the payroll entries made on a bi-weekly basis. Before, these would be based off a pdf report which was transferred manually into Excel employee by employee. However, only a few numbers needed to be entered into the accounting system. The problem was that the numbers were not directly available from the pdf. Still, it was made possible to get a summarized report in Excel from the payroll vendor and suddenly all that manual work was eliminated!
• Redesign: The month-end close process almost had to be reinvented in full but one of the key changes was the introduction of a macro-based accrual tool. Before only limited accruals were done monthly and they were done manually. The new tool was introduced making it possible to transfer all needed accruals between the purchasing system and the accounting system. This both eliminated manual processes and increased the quality of the numbers.
• Delegate: Before the finance manager would do a lot of the month-end activities himself, however, this left the accountants on the outside when they clearly had the capacity to help. Hence, one of the key things that were delegated was the upload of the numbers from the accounting system to the consolidation system. This ensured that everyone could work alongside each other all the way until the deadline.
• Offshore: Another key process change happened in the intercompany settlement process. Before this would be handled by each finance manager around the world which especially caused delays from the HQ finance manager. This process was offshored to the shared service centre ensuring that the settlement documents arrived like a clockwork on deadline day. Without this change, it would never have been possible to achieve the workday one close! 

This did not happen in just a few months but as a result of a continuous improvement effort and eventually helped Anders and the team to do a lot more value-adding work! 

Throw in a 2X2 matrix and you are done 

Now go back to Stephen Covey’s 2X2 matrix and begin to rank all your activities in the urgency and importance scale. That will quickly tell you what to do with the various tasks. We are confident that you can free up 20% of your time for more value-adding work. That is one day per week! 

It is important though that you know what to do instead because the largest pitfall of doing this exercise is not knowing what to do instead. What happens then? You will fill your time with other unproductive tasks and then you have not moved an inch. 

Business partnering starts with running an efficient company that is constantly looking to improve on doing things right and then taking on new priorities. We suggest you get started today because why wait to free up time in your calendar? 

Business Partnering Institute can help you get a better idea of the role of the business partner. We do that also by helping you free up time and build personal capacity to get more done in the time that you’re working through energy management. You can reach us today at [email protected] or get directly in touch with Anders on +45 2926 6410.

This was the seventh article in the series "Business Partnering On A Formula". You can read past articles in the series below.

This Is How We Succeed With Business Partnering

Business Partnering On A Formula

This Is How Business Partners Have Impact And Drive Value Creation

Here's Why You Want A Business Partner At The Table

Decision ≠ Action - But What Can Finance Do About It?

How Do Business Partners Generate Insights?

If you want to become a better business partner you should consider taking our online course "Business Partnering Explained - Value Creation Unlocked" to get a better handle on the role. It's accredited for 5.5 CPD hours.

You can read a lot more articles about FP&A, Business Partnering, and Finance Transformation below. It all start's with “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” where you set the ambition for your transformation. You should join the Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow me on Twitter.

Your Journey To Successful Business Partnering Explained

How To Create Value Through Business Partnering

Everyone Can Adopt A Business Partnering Mindset (part of a six-article series about FP&A Business Partnering)

From Business Partner To Working Within The Business (part of an article series where I interview finance professionals about their careers in FP&A and Business Partnering)

Is Your Product Optimized For Value Creation? (part of a toolbox series where we look at what tools FP&A professionals should leverage to drive value creation)

How Business Partners Turn Analysis To Insight (part of case study series where I interview business partners about how they drive value creation using real cases)

The Future Of FP&A: Two Ways To Take The Reins

What Is The Accounting Profession Paradox?

What Defines A Finance Master?

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How To Become A Finance Business Partner

Financial Analyst vs. Finance Business Partner

Finance Business Partner Is A Bullshit Job

How Business Partners Keep A Plan On Track

Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, COO (Chief Operating Officer), and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 8,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company Maersk. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger on LinkedIn with 40.000+ followers.