C.J. Wimley
executive vice president,
SunGard’s AvantGard
business unit
As the role of the finance and credit professionals has migrated from a purely back office function to more of a strategic partner, they are in a position to connect the dots across the financial supply chain. In this environment, organizations are less focused on hierarchy and protocol and are increasingly more fluid. The treasury, finance and accounting function must work closely with sales, customers and trading partners to facilitate relationships and maximize a company’s profitability.
Today’s finance and credit professional must be able to operate within this environment to leverage the financial relationships that exist in the ecosystem of suppliers, buyers, banks, data providers, and other trading partners. Connectivity within this ecosystem will reduce friction along the financial supply chain and will increase visibility into cash flow, greatly improving liquidity management.
A true collaborative network brings together suppliers and buyers and facilitates information sharing in a centralized environment.
The use of connectivity platforms facilitate workflow and data exchange more effectively; allowing companies to integrate third party data that can be used to help view current and future supply chain finance strategies. One example is to take benchmarking data from industry groups and place that against internal data to more accurately measure marketplace trends as well as performance. These tools are also useful for calculating the impact on cash flow from accepting invoice discounts with the ability to perform what-if scenario analysis. Other examples include creating customer scorecards to measure vendor compliance, chargebacks and other profitability indicators.
As companies begin to migrate to a more holistic view of the financial supply chain, there will be an increased opportunity for finance and credit professionals to deliver even greater value as the facilitator of information and data flow across the ecosystem of suppliers, buyers, banks, data providers and other trading partners.
We have organized more information on EcoSystem Connectivity, which we hope you will find useful. What are some of the ways you are connecting your partners? Are they working? Share your comments.