Finance Strategy Expertise

The Hackett Group’s finance consulting division provides CFOs and senior finance executives with business benchmarking. finance strategy. transformation and advisory services that enable objective performance evaluation and provide insights into proven business best practices, as well as the design and implementation of high-ROI transformation solutions.

Finance Strategy

Today’s Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are concerned with everything from maximizing shareholder value to accurate quarterly earnings forecasts and developing the next generation of finance leaders for the company. They recognize that to be successful they must obtain, interpret and report critical information at an ever-increasing pace, while ensuring compliance across a dynamic enterprise.

As always, business cost management is a critical element of finance strategy, key to driving efficiency in routine transactional processes that allows a shift in focus to building the enterprise value of the finance function. This includes interpreting and advising on critical business information; managing/driving capital allocation and value creation; and creating balanced view of earnings, cash flow and return on assets or equity.

Hackett’s finance consulting divison works with CFOs to address the entire range of these challenges and help steer the organization’s finance strategy toward creating a value-driven finance organization.

Organizational Effectiveness

Hackett’s finance consulting division helps companies develop a sound finance strategy to maximize the performance of their finance processes while reducing their costs. Hackett uses proven business best practices to accelerate the development of world-class solutions and to link these solutions to the overall business strategies of the enterprise, for the greatest shareholder return. Our experts help the finance function design and sequence key transformational strategies to assure effective and efficient execution of best-practice-based process improvement. including process elimination or automation, shared services deployment, and improved planning and enterprise performance management .

Working Capital Management

Freeing up cash from unnecessary working capital is the cheapest form of financing. Our working capital management group, REL, helps companies implement the right finance strategy and working capital management solutions that balance the trade-off between working capital, operating costs and service performance. Our finance consulting experts have helped clients achieve billions of dollars/euros/pounds in cost reductions. cash that can be used other strategic initiatives. Utilizing in-depth finance strategy and process improvement expertise, analytical rigor, and collaborative client relationships have enabled us to deliver exceptional return on investment in a short timeframe. Our working capital management solutions focus on the performance of three cross-functional end-to-end processes:

• Customer-to-Cash: as measured in days sales outstanding (DSO)
• Source-to-Settle (aka Procure-to-Pay): measured as days payable outstanding and
• Forecast-to-Fulfill: measured by days inventory-on-hand (DIO)

Compliance

Faced with a constantly changing regulatory environment, today’s CFOs need to mitigate the risk of non-compliance without raising function costs. Hackett consultants identify best practice ways that organizations can simplify compliance processes, achieve significant cost reductions and reduce the risk of errors in compliance activities locally and globally.

Globalization/Strategic Sourcing

No decision is as critical today than an effective globalization and/or strategic sourcing strategy. Hackett leverages the insights and KPI measurements from our renowned database to achieve quantifiable cost reductions and assess the value-added potential of moving labor from high-cost to low-cost markets, whether via a captive or third-party model. Hackett’s holistic approach to business process outsourcing helps clients align their corporate strategy and business model to strategic sourcing solutions, identify which processes should be prioritized, and provides an experienced partner to help navigate site and/or supplier selection, transition and effective governance models.

Given the added risk of longer, more complicated supply chains, changing or varied regulatory environments and local management practices, Hackett finance consultants work with the CFO to ensure that globalization does not adversely impact the ability of the organization to maintain effective compliance and clear visibility into global strategic sourcing processes.

Planning and Performance Management (PPM)

Whether referred to as PPM or Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), the need for effective planning, forecasting and management of the business has never been greater. Hackett’s research shows that even though companies risk being punished in the marketplace when they miss their earnings targets, most firms fail to get it right, to adopt the appropriate finance strategy and enterprise performance management processes. The advent of very sophisticated tools has provided the capability to strengthen this critical area, but most firms have failed to institute the appropriate processes that support and enable the technology to provide the benefits possible. Hackett works with finance, planning and controlling executives to build linked processes that ensure the right KPIs and metrics are being utilized, that timing of planning events matches the business cycles and that early indicators are used to identify shifts in key forecasted components.

For more information on any of the Advisory Programs, Benchmarking Programs, Finance Strategy, Finance Consulting or Transformation Programs, contact us .