Your Digital Finance Transformation Journey

This article is co-written by Bart Krijntjes and Anders Liu-Lindberg 

You’ve created your roadmap, you’ve decided on your working methods and you know that going digital is not just about choosing what technology to use. Put in another way you’ve packed your bags, are ready to go and to leave on the jet plane that’s going to take you on your digital transformation journey. It’s therefore time that Bart and I describe the journey in more details for you so you don’t miss any of the important stops along the way. 

Your digital transformation journey 

There are some essential stops you need to make on the way on your digital transformation journey and skipping them will certainly land you in a poor digital state. Hence, consider carefully if you want to take a chance on skipping any of the below steps. 

1. Analyze your current process(es)
2. Design your future process(es)
3. Optimize and automate your process(es)
4. Choose metrics and measure progress
5. Review outcomes
6. Continuously improve

Let’s look closer at the first three steps.

Analyze your current process(es)

The most important step in any journey is to establish a base line. For digital transformation it applies as well. Even if your organization has a well established governance model for processes and deviations to the standard process are well documented and have undergone an approval process you need to get the baseline right. That's because there is a difference between how the process is defined and how in reality it is being done. Process mining is an approach, which can support you in analyzing how the process is being executed. This is a technology that can help you to get insights on how the process is performed. If theory and reality are not aligned then you might have yourself a broken process. 

Why “might”? It is too early to jump to conclusions. You have to validate why the process on paper is different from reality. There might be a number of valid reasons for it. The most commonly used valid reason is that the process needs to run in a certain way due to legal requirements. It might also be that the people doing the job do not have the right skill set to do their job. 

We have also heard many non-valid reasons like…

• …I was never trained properly
• …I have no tools or systems available to get the job done
• …“we have always done it like this”.

That does not make it a justifiable reason. Based on your analysis you will have identified several challenges in the process. These challenges can be used in the next phase as you also remember one important rule of digital transformation which is not to digitize broken processes. Your broken process will be locked into a system or robot and changing it will be costly. That’s why your first stop on the journey is to figure out if your process(es) are working or not. 

Design your future process(es)

Once you know the state of your process landscape you can start designing your future process. It is important that as part of designing the future process you challenge the status quo. It is all about elimination of redundant activities.Furthermore, as part of the analysis you have identified certain challenges in the process that need resolution. Important here is that you focus on the challenges that have a significant impact on your ability to increase either Shareholder Value, improving Customer Experience or improving Employee Value. Based on the complexity of the challenges in the process there are several approaches to solve it. Either you do a full process redesign or you focus on the problem areas. Both approaches have advantages as well as disadvantages. So in the design phase, you could leverage design thinking to engage people to come up with ideas on how the process can run in the future as we have previously described. In design thinking workshops you will learn that most people just want to implement a tool to fix the problems. Just throwing technology will only fix part of the problem as it fails to address the people and organizational element as also previously described. 

Based on the outcome of the prototypes and first testing you move to the next phase. The most important thing in this phase is to gather feedback and act on it.  

Optimize and automate your process(es)

With the analysis and design phase done you’ve completed the most painful stops on the journey yet now comes the hard part. EXECUTION. You have identified areas which require optimization and could use automation. It is time to implement your new processes followed by the digitization of them. The key principle here is automation ensuring as many efficiency gains as possible although there are many cases that going digital doesn’t automatically mean automation. It could just as well mean instead of keeping things updated in Excel sheets and Power Point presentations that you get an online tool that enables real-time updates across a project team or user base. In summary, the first three stops on journey are ANALYZE, DESIGN & EXECUTE. 

From there you monitor progress through selected measures and evaluate if you achieve the expected outcomes. Then all that’s left is to continuously improve through e.g. Lean Six Sigma. 

Safe (fast) journey ahead! 

By now you should be comfortable about getting on the journey and while this sounds like something that’s going to take a long time it’s not. You know that from Design Thinking and DevOps that you’ll do this work in sprints of 1-4 weeks quickly producing results that will fast digitize your company or the part of your process landscape that you’re focusing on. In any case, when talking about digital you can’t create roadmaps that will only yield results on 3-5 years because you know that what seems to be state of the art in digital today might be ancient tech in a few years from now. 

Now it’s your turn! Tell us your stories about your efforts of going digital whether it’s a grand transformation or some smaller sub processes that you have digitized? By sharing these experiences with us and others we can make the journey much safer for those that are yet to pack their bags.

This was the fourth article from Bart and me in our Digital Finance Transformation series. For previous articles in the series and others about robotics and finance transformation, you can continue reading from below. I’d also encourage you to join the Finance Business Partner Forum where not only do we discuss Business Partnering but just as much what is going to enable us to partner with the business.

A CFOs Digital Finance Transformation Roadmap

To Go Digital Finance Must Work Differently

Going Digital Is About More Than Technology

Have You Met Your Robot Accountant Yet?

Robots Are The Future Of Analytics

Your Robot Accountant Has A Name, It's Dixie

Where Are All The Robots Sci-Fi Told Us About?

What Defines A Finance Master?

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Head of Global Finance Program Management Office at Maersk and has more than 10 years of experience working with Finance at Maersk both in Denmark and abroad. My main goal at Maersk is to create a world-class finance function not least when it comes to Business Partnering. I am the co-author of the book “Skab V?rdi Som Finansiel Forretningspartner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with more than 18.000 followers.