The Changing Role of the Finance Organization in a Multi-Polar World

Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
The Changing Role of the
Finance Organization in a
Multi-Polar World
Accenture High Performance
Finance Study 2008

Table of Contents
4 Foreword
5 Executive Summary
9 Globalization Is Having
a Major Impact on the
Finance Organization
14 The Finance Organizations’
Overall Performance Is
Lagging
18 Lack of Alignment
Between Finance and
the Business Impedes
Progress
22 Use of Benchmarking Is
Not Widespread
24 Value-Centered Culture
Is Critical but Not
Pervasive
25 Workforce Issues
Challenge Most Finance
Organizations
28 True Enterprise
Performance
Management Is Lacking
in Most Companies
30 Change Is Needed in
How Enterprises Manage
Risk
33 Leading Finance
Organizations Are Rising
to the Challenge
38 Conclusion
40 Appendix
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 3

Foreword
By Dan London
For companies seeking high
performance, these are indeed
challenging times. While globalization
has presented enterprises with new
growth opportunities in previously
unserved or underserved markets, it
also has substantially increased the
complexity, pace of change and risk
executives must confront. In fact,
dealing with the ramifications of
today’s multi-polar world—a world in
which economic might emanates from
multiple points around the globe, not
just from traditional centers of power—
has become one of the most pressing
strategic concerns of companies
everywhere. In most enterprises,
significant responsibility for helping
guide the enterprise through these
largely uncharted waters falls on
the chief financial officer (CFO). Far
from merely acting as a company’s
“head accountant,” today’s CFOs face
a broad set of challenges they must
address to help keep their companies
on the road to becoming a highperformance
business.
In our work with clients around the
world, Accenture has experienced
these challenges firsthand. We know
how CFOs must continually work to
strike the appropriate balance between
managing the company’s finances
while providing the strategic guidance
4 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
to the enterprise that chief executive
officers increasingly expect from them.
We see CFOs diligently striving to keep
a tight rein on costs while helping
the business create greater value for
customers and shareholders. And we
witness time and again CFOs’ efforts to
infuse greater organizational flexibility
and responsiveness so their companies
can act quickly in the face of the rapid
change that has become the hallmark
of a truly global economy.
These experiences led Accenture to
embark on a comprehensive research
effort to not only shed further light
on the challenges CFOs face, but
also to identify the practices that
“finance masters” are employing
to help position their companies
to achieve high performance. Our
research included an in-depth survey
of hundreds of finance executives
around the world, as well as deeper
interviews with other CFOs who have
led or are leading successful initiatives
to improve critical aspects of their
finance organization.
What did our research reveal? We
found most finance organizations
are neither performing at a high
level nor focused on developing the
capabilities they need to address key
operational and strategic challenges.
We further found that while finance
executives consider attracting and
retaining talent to be one of their
biggest challenges, most companies
are lagging in practices they consider
critical to building and sustaining
an effective finance workforce. And
we discovered that many finance
organizations do not have a full and
accurate understanding of their total
cost structure, making it difficult for
them to determine how and where to
concentrate improvement efforts.
Conversely, our research also identified
a number of companies in which the
finance organization understands and
invests in those capabilities required
for high performance in both the
finance organization and the business
overall. They have a strategy and
execute it skillfully. These organizations
recognize that mastery of the finance
function does not require one to be
the best at everything, but rather, only
in those areas that count. In other
words, they focus on building superior
capabilities that enable the company
to excel in areas that are critical to
driving value for both shareholders
and the enterprise.
As a result of this approach, masters
are much more likely than their peers
to have generated a more positive
impact from their finance-improvement
initiatives, as well as to be more
satisfied with the performance of the
finance organization across myriad
dimensions. And as Accenture’s ongoing
research on the characteristics of high
performance has confirmed, the tight
alignment of finance strategies and
capabilities within the larger enterprise
strategy is a key factor in a company’s
ability to achieve superior financial
results consistently over time.
On the following pages we explore the
results of our research in detail. We
hope that our findings inspire useful
dialogue among executives on the
role of both the finance organization
and finance executive in the larger
enterprise. We also trust that the
insights herein will help provide
valuable direction on the key initiatives
finance should undertake to build the
capabilities that optimally support a
company’s pursuit of high performance
in a multi-polar world.
Dan London
Managing Director
Finance & Performance Management
service line

Executive Summary
Globalization, a force that has been
shaping the political and commercial
world for decades, is entering a new
and more complex phase. It is no longer
a concept exported to the emerging
world by the traditionally dominant
economies of the West. Emerging
economies have grasped globalization,
packaged it up, and are sending new
versions of it back to the West.
As globalization enters this new phase
in which there are now multiple centers
of economic power and activity—a
concept Accenture calls the multipolar
world—finance executives find
themselves challenged as never before.
Indeed, the speed with which the global
market changes, the volatility imposed
by multiple currencies and electronic
exchanges and the sheer complexity
of operating on a global scale in
countries or regions of varying degrees
of development, all place extraordinary
Globalization is having a major
impact on the finance organization.
Increasing globalization is challenging
CFOs to develop new capabilities to
deal with rapid change and heightened
complexity, competition and pressure
to control costs.
The finance organization's overall
performance is lagging.
Few finance executives today believe
their finance organization performs at
the highest level. This is compromising
CFOs’ ability to respond to their
mandates and to seize opportunities for
the finance organization to create value.
Lack of alignment between finance
and the business impedes progress.
Many finance organizations aren’t
focused on the right capabilities
required for high performance in both
their finance organization and the
business overall. As a result, it is hit
or miss as to whether the investments
made in finance will make a difference.
demands on an enterprise’s finance
organization. It is the finance
organization that must take a leadership
role in driving the enterprise toward
continuing value creation, ensuring
the enterprise possesses the strategies,
capabilities and information to succeed
in the hypercompetitive global market
even as it continues to control and
contain costs. In short, the challenge
confronting finance executives today
is enormous: helping the enterprise
to optimize its processes (including
those in the finance organization) to
achieve the highest possible levels of
performance so that it can remain
competitive and maximize the value it
generates for its shareholders.
It is against this backdrop that
Accenture conducted its third High
Performance Finance Study since 2004.
Through this comprehensive research
effort, Accenture explores the most
Use of benchmarking is not
widespread.
Most finance organizations don’t
understand their underlying cost
structures—in part because most have
not benchmarked their organizations
against similar enterprises.
Value-centric culture is critical but
not pervasive.
Finance executives believe that
building a value-centered culture
to help boost shareholder value
creation is one of the most important
contributions finance can make.
Workforce issues challenge most
finance organizations.
Attracting and retaining talent is one of
the biggest expected challenges of the
next two years. However, companies
are lagging in practices they consider
critical to building and sustaining an
effective finance workforce.
pressing challenges facing finance
executives around the world, how they
are faring in addressing these challenges,
and the strategies and practices that
leading organizations are employing to
contribute to high performance in the
finance organization and the enterprise
at large.
In this year’s research, we surveyed
more than 350 finance executives in
companies representing 30 countries
across a range of more than 20 industry
sectors. To augment our survey findings,
we also conducted in-depth interviews
with several finance executives at
other organizations to explore in
more detail how they were dealing
with the challenges facing today’s
finance organizations. And, we also
talked with numerous experts within
Accenture to get their insights on
some of the keys to high performance
they have observed in their roundtable
True enterprise performance
management is lacking in most
companies.
An integrated approach to enterprise
performance management, which can
drive bottom-line results, is lacking in
a majority of companies in our study.
Change is needed in how enterprises
manage risk.
A large percentage of companies lack
the capabilities that enable them
to manage risk in an integrated and
transparent way.
Leading finance organizations are
rising to the challenge.
Finance masters follow the right
strategy and invest in the capabilities
they need to drive high performance
in their finance organization and the
business overall.
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 5

The most intriguing
characteristic that
distinguishes finance masters
from their peers is that
they recognize they do not
need to excel at everything,
and, in fact they do not.
discussions with hundreds of finance
executives as well as their work with
finance organizations at businesses and
government entities around the globe.
What did our research tell us? For
starters, we found few executives
today believe their finance
organization is performing at the
highest possible level. We also found
many believe they lack the processes,
data, tools, organizational structures,
governance and skilled workforces they
need to capitalize on the new markets,
resources and opportunities for value
creation the global economy offers.
Perhaps more troubling, our research
findings suggest that in many
instances, while executives know
they need to improve their finance
capabilities, they are not sure where
to begin. A majority of survey
respondents reported that they do
not understand their underlying
cost structure and therefore cannot
6 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
determine their annual cost of finance
(the total cost of all people, processes
and technologies performing in the
finance organization) and related
cost drivers. This lack of insight
and data, and the concomitant lack
of actionable metrics to measure
performance, makes it very difficult,
if not impossible, to identify where
and how improvements could be
made, and what investments (and
what levels of investment) make
the most sense both in terms of
competing successfully and enhancing
shareholder value. And these
difficulties are only exacerbated by
the general paucity of benchmarking
initiatives conducted by the finance
organization, a shortcoming we
found prevalent among our survey
participants. Without proper
benchmarking, CFOs may be driving
their enterprise, but they are driving
it without a roadmap.
In fact, our research found that in
many enterprises, there is a lack of
alignment between what finance
executives indicated was most
important to them and the initiatives
they were actually undertaking in the
next two years. This suggests to us
that companies have not developed
a strong enough finance strategy
to ensure that they are building the
finance capabilities that are truly
important to the business.
Indeed, our survey found that only
about half of participating companies
have implemented in the past two
years a finance strategy that addresses
organization, processes, technology
and alignment with enterprise strategy.
A large portion of our survey
focused on enterprise performance
management (EPM), enterprise risk
management (ERM) and the finance
workforce—key capabilities that are
critical to the finance organization’s

ability to support today’s modern,
global enterprise. We discovered
that, as was the case in other
areas covered by our survey, a large
percentage of organizations reported
falling short of high performance in
developing such capabilities.
For instance, only 20 percent of
respondents described their EPM
capabilities as “advanced,” a situation
that makes it difficult for executives
to identify the key metrics that will
enable them to evaluate and tune
overall enterprise performance.
Furthermore, despite the fact that
their companies face increasingly
pervasive risk as they expand their
operations globally, just 8 percent of
all companies surveyed indicated they
have a centralized, fully integrated
risk management capability that is
used uniformly across the enterprise
(and only 17 percent indicated that
they were close to approaching
such a capability). And, although
survey respondents said attracting
and retaining talent will be one
of their biggest challenges in the
next two years, most companies
are lagging in implementing
practices they themselves consider
critical to building and sustaining
an effective finance workforce.
Companies were especially trailing in
encouraging regular and meaningful
communications between supervisors
and employees; documenting
business processes in such a way that
employees understand them; investing
money in training them and time in
mentoring them; and implementing
knowledge management tools and
processes to encourage the sharing
of innovative ideas and to preserve
institutional knowledge.
We did, however, also find evidence
of advanced practices in a number
of organizations participating in
our research. Some have excelled
in adopting enterprise resource
planning (ERP) to consolidate
operations, reduce complexity and
produce a streamlined, coordinated
financial information flow that makes
it easier to drive enterprise value.
Others, including Brazil-based mining
company Vale (formerly CVRD), have
implemented numerous workforce
programs that help the company
address the challenge of managing
talent across developed and emerging
economies. Still others, like a global
healthcare company we interviewed,
have developed a robust strategy that
emphasizes the systems, processes
and people they need to ensure
senior executives are comfortable
that the right governance, marketing,
compliance, reporting and other
practices are in place.
Another group of companies is setting
a high bar for their peers in terms
of how they structure their finance
organization, the maturity of key
finance capabilities and the results
they generate. These companies are
those we called the “finance masters”
in our survey. The most intriguing
characteristic that distinguishes
masters from their peers is that they
recognize they do not need to excel
at everything, and, in fact they do
not. Rather, to get the biggest return
on their scarce resources—to drive
the greatest value to the overall
business—finance masters simply focus
on the areas that count. In other words,
the finance masters in our survey
were highly adept at identifying the
finance capabilities that are critical to
supporting the business in its pursuit
of high performance. They pinpointed
where those capabilities fell short of
what was required, and aggressively
applied their resources to close the gaps.
As finance executives around the
world continue to grapple with
how to most effectively support
their enterprises while maintaining
sufficient control on costs—all the
while dealing with the increased
speed, complexity, competition
and risk inherent in a multi-polar
world—they should keep in mind
three important concepts. One, that
strategy matters—a lot. Without
it, there is no way to know which
finance capabilities are most relevant
and which consume scarce resources
unnecessarily. Two, superior finance
practices can change the game.
Finance organizations that can keep
pace with the speed of change and
effectively deal with complexity can
drive substantial bottom-line results.
And three, the status quo won’t
work. The role of the CFO today is
broader and more complex than ever
and, consequently, requires finance
executives to develop new approaches
to managing their function and
interacting with the business at
large—or risk being left behind.
Organizations that use these principles
to guide their finance organization
activities are significantly more likely
to find themselves on the road to
high performance today and in the
uncertain future ahead.
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 7

Key Findings
As the centers of economic
might increasingly become
distributed around the
globe, managing the
financial organization
of the enterprise across
borders and time zones
becomes increasingly
complex.
8 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets

Globalization
Is Having a
Major Impact
on the Finance
Organization
The opportunity presented by the
increasing globalization of business is
a two-sided coin, especially for CFOs
and their finance organization. On
one side, there is the promise of new
markets for the enterprise’s products
and services, new avenues for the CFO
to champion the development of a
robust culture focused on creating value
for the shareholder and new pools of
talent and labor from which to draw
in emerging markets and developing
economies. On the other side, there’s the
pressure to deal with rapid change and
the risks that emerge from heightened
complexity; new, agile competitors
jostling for market share, and the
always-present but now ever-moreimportant
urgency to control costs.
A host of new challenges, on top
of an already-full agenda, currently
confront CFOs in this emergent,
globalized, hypercompetitive world. The
four main challenges—all interrelated
and interdependent—that Accenture
identified as requiring the CFOs'
immediate attention come in the
areas of cost-control, competition, risk
management and people management.
In the face of competitors that can
leverage the built-in advantage of lower
overhead in developing countries, CFOs
are under pressure to reduce operating
costs without sacrificing customer
service or jeopardizing the returns
expected by the enterprise’s stakeholders.
To rise to the challenge presented
by these new, cost-efficient, agile
competitors, CFOs must modify (or,
in some cases, transform) the finance
infrastructure to enable their enterprise
to enter new businesses and develop
new strategies to respond to rapidly
changing market dynamics. One of
these overarching business strategies
is to grow the enterprise by acquiring
or merging with other companies in
target markets, thereby obtaining
new capabilities, and that means
determining the best ways to integrate
their workforces, financial processes
and varying or divergent information
technology platforms into their own.
With each of these mergers or
acquisitions, as these enterprises gain
new facilities and operational territories
around the world, the enterprise assumes
new risks, and the CFO must confront
and comply with new and perhaps
unfamiliar regulatory requirements, while
preparing for amplified scrutiny from
financial markets, government agencies
and shareholders.
Finally, the CFO must recruit, train
and retain new talent with the skills
necessary to perform in this new
environment while dealing with a
changing workforce characterized by
the accelerating retirement of the
Baby Boomers (who take with them
decades of institutional knowledge),
the emergence of Gen Y (with its
training needs, evolving workplace
expectations and motivational
demands), and the necessity for
integrating workers from around the
world, each with their own unique
cultural predispositions and skill sets.
As the centers of economic might
become increasingly distributed around
the globe, managing the financial
organization of the enterprise across
borders and time zones becomes
increasingly complex, particularly if
the enterprise wishes to compete and
excel by developing new capabilities
and business models to take advantage
of all the opportunities the new global
environment has to offer.
The opportunities to leverage new
sources of raw materials and labor, and
to grow into new markets, offering
new services and products to new
customers, is obvious and compelling.
But there’s no understating the
complexity that taking advantage of
these global opportunities will add to
the enterprise’s processes, especially to
those of the finance organization.
When enterprise operations are
globally dispersed, when many of those
operations are sited and conducted in
developing countries with immature
infrastructures and varying human
resource skill levels, everything changes
for the CFO and the enterprise.
Reporting relationships change. Tax
structures and their implications for
investment and conducting business
change. Regulatory and compliance
requirements change. Business
processes and the technologies needed
to enable them must change. And
with all these changes comes risk:
the vagaries of international politics,
the fluctuations of world currencies
and the attendant complexities of
extended supply and distribution
chains, to name just a few. The more
an enterprise wishes to take advantage
of global opportunities, the greater
the operational and financial risk it
must assume, and the more critical it
becomes for CFOs to employ Enterprise
Risk Management, both to recognize
potential problems and to gain the
overall view of the business required
to drive the operational excellence
necessary for growth and success. The
CFO must use that enterprise-wide view
to take a leading role in advising the
company on how to create value by
taking advantage of tax drivers while
ameliorating their negative impact; how
to optimize the enterprise’s financial
structure to make it as efficient,
productive and secure as possible;
how to be prepared to leverage those
currency fluctuations; and how to do all
these things while maintaining a laserlike
focus on creating and preserving
shareholder value.
To meet these challenges and deliver
the value the enterprise and its
stakeholders increasingly demand,
CFOs must have a plan to reduce
the cost structure of their finance
operations, especially in non-core,
transactional areas such as order/entry
and commodity-type functions such
as payroll. CFOs must also be prepared
to compete globally for talent to staff
their operations and to have a strategy
to retain a skilled finance workforce.
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 9

3 COLUMNS WIDE
Figure 1. Opportunities presented to the finance organization as a result of
globalization
5%
21%
20%
35%
33%
32%
41%
39%
Opportunity to restructure the finance
organization (e.g. take advantage of multiple
sourcing options) for greater value creation
Access to a broader base of skilled workers
at competitive costs
Expanded opportunities for outsourcing
Greater access and opportunity for
finance organization innovation
Opportunity to provide more diverse
leadership to the finance workforce
Access to differentiated, specialized skills
not readily available in existing geographies
Greater access to capital
Other
Above all, CFOs operating globally
must have the ability to accurately,
predictably and continuously monitor
the performance and health of the
business, in real-time. Without that
capability, it becomes impossible to
make sound financial decisions, or
react to changing business conditions,
with the speed required today as
technology reduces product lifecycles,
and lowers the barriers to entry in a
host of businesses, encouraging new,
agile and avid competitors to enter
the global arena.
What our research reveals
The reality of the life of a CFO in today’s
global economy is reflected in the results
of Accenture’s research. In one section of
our survey, we sought to understand how
finance executives viewed globalization
as it pertained to the finance
organization. We wanted to know how
these executives perceived the:
• Opportunities globalization presents
to improve the finance organization
10 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
• Challenges the finance organization
faces as the enterprise pursues
emerging markets as both sources and
customers for goods and services
• Challenges posed by competitors
from emerging economies entering
mature markets
• Capabilities they believe they need
most to compete in the global arena.
Finance executives believe the greatest
opportunity globalization provides
is to support greater value creation
by enabling them to restructure
their finance organization to take
advantage of the multiple sourcing
options presented by operating on a
global scale—cited by 41 percent of all
respondents (Figure 1). Next on the list
is access to a broader base of skilled
workers at competitive costs (cited
by 39 percent), followed by expanded
opportunities for outsourcing (cited
by 35 percent).
The biggest challenge these executives
see when it comes to entering emerging
markets is the necessity for building and
sustaining the levels of governance and
internal controls (cited by 58 percent
of respondents) that will be required
to comply with new and heretofore
unfamiliar currency, regulatory, tax and
compliance demands. Close behind that,
at 52 percent, is the need to maintain
standardized processes and technologies
across the finance operation as the
enterprise either grows organically or
acquires or partners with new businesses
in these markets. The third greatest
concern of these executives (cited by
42 percent) is the difficulty of finding a
workforce sufficiently skilled to support
the organization’s efforts and growth in
these new markets.
As more companies from emerging and
developing economies expand their
operations to more mature markets,
establishing themselves as viable and
aggressive competitors with builtin
cost advantages, 55 percent of
finance executives surveyed indicate

3 COLUMNS WIDE
Figure 2. Key finance capabilities required to be best positioned for globalization
9%
17%
4%
29%
35%
43%
48%
Standardized operating environment (i.e. finance
organization, processes and technologies) across
geographies or business units
Ability to comply with the variety of tax and regulatory
requirements associated with global operations
Advanced and integrated analytics and
performance management and reporting
Greater focus on driving a value-centered
culture across the enterprise
Advanced workforce programs (recruiting,
training, career management, etc.)
New or advanced outsourcing or shared
services arrangements
Other
that controlling costs and keeping
prices competitive will be a major
success factor for them. Not only will
more established enterprises have to
compete on cost and price, they also
will need to compete for talent to staff
their operations. Indeed, 41 percent of
the surveyed executives say a major
challenge will be retaining skilled staff
as new companies enter their markets.
One way established companies can
compete in this arena is to leverage
their global brand which, presumably,
is better known than their competitors’,
and therefore more attractive
to workers looking to associate
themselves with a successful operation
promising the rewards of status and
stability. (Another way to address the
competition for talent is the strategic
deployment of business process
outsourcing, leaving staff recruitment
to local providers, given, of course, that
the established company maintains
strong service level agreements [SLAs],
the right governance model and
rigorous, top-level oversight.)
Director of Shared Services 5%
Tax Director 4%
Treasurer 2%
Other 3%
Comptroller/Controller 13%
It’s worth noting that when it comes requirements that come with operating
to competing for talent, emerging- globally (Figure 2). About one-third
economy companies face their own of responding executives say they will
unique challenges as they attempt to need advanced and integrated analytics
conduct business in more-developed and performance management and
countries and markets. When Brazil- reporting capabilities through new
based Vale, the world’s second-largest software tools and IT systems.
mining company, acquired Canada’s
second-largest mining company in Three critical capabilities for
2006, Vale faced significant challenges high performance
in retaining people. “[Canada] is a
different market,” says Pedro Zinner,
Vale’s chief global risk management
officer. “It’s a developed economy with
different Not reported values 20% and concepts from
what we have in Brazil.”
In Accenture’s experience, three
practices have become critical tools
for helping finance organizations and
their enterprises address the complexity
and cost-control challenges associated
with increasing globalization. These
To meet globalization’s challenges and practices—the creation CFO 23% of a shared
position their finance organization services structure, a strategic approach
President/CEO 2%
for success, the largest percentage to outsourcing and the implementation
of finance executives surveyed
of enterprise-wide ERP systems—enable
(48 percent) say they will need a companies to standardize operations
BETWEEN 4 & 5 COLUMNS WIDE
standardized operating environment among widely dispersed business units.
NEED TO ADJUST
across geographies and business This standardization leads to greater
units, and 43 percent say they will operational efficiency and grants the
need the ability to comply with the agility that enterprises require both
proliferation of tax and regulatory to grow and to respond quickly to
dynamic market conditions.
Vice President /DIrector of FInance 30%
Chief Risk Officer 1%
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 11

Shared services
Most often, the business case for
shared services (the model in which
an internal organization, like finance,
becomes an internal service provider of
largely non-core functions to multiple
business organizations within the
enterprise) focuses on cost savings and
cost avoidance, with the potential value
add of increased internal customer
satisfaction. While these are important
tactical goals, Accenture believes the
shared services model—properly planned
and deployed—can become a key
strategic driver of high performance in
the global business environment.
From an operational standpoint, success
on a global scale requires being both
highly global and highly local. The
winners will be those enterprises that
have strong global operations—highly
standardized to reap economies of
scale—as well as strong local capabilities
to serve and compete for customers.
Shared services can be a powerful tool
for achieving that balance between
being simple on the inside, with
highly standardized processes, and
differentiated on the outside, with a
strong customer focus and high levels
of service. A key success factor in
shared services is finding a balance
between focusing on customer needs
and delivering service at a competitive
cost. A buyer has to perceive value
in a service at the price quoted. That,
in turn, forces the shared services
organization to get very specific
about its value proposition. Learning
to balance cost and value keeps the
company focused on the customer. And
standardization controls costs. In our
research and experience, organizations
that drive toward a higher level of
simplification on the inside through
more standardized processes (one
executive we’ve worked with on a
shared services implementation spoke
of being “ruthless” about driving
standardization) achieve reliably higher
levels of business performance.
Many organizations are finding that
shared services organizations provide
an engine to drive growth, especially
12 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
through mergers and acquisitions,
where they act as a powerful tool to
attain full value from the expected
synergies that inspired the acquisition
or merger in the first place.
Along with growth, the shared services
model allows companies to increase
their agility. Accenture has found that
they help companies convert rapidly
from dispersed operations based on
geographic considerations or business
unit convenience to centralized
operations based on a globally
consistent approach—thereby making
it easier for finance executives to
create the levels of enterprise-wide
governance and internal controls that
58 percent of our respondents identify
as being critical to success when
entering new and emergent markets.
Not only that, but the governance
model needed for successful shared
services operations—including servicelevel
agreements (SLAs) and joint
review boards—can be extended to
support efforts to drive change across
the entire enterprise. By developing
experience creating and using joint
management teams, companies can
bring business units together in pursuit
of common enterprise goals.
SAP is one company that has seen how
shared services can support a global
enterprise. The software giant has used
shared services to create a standardized
platform that enables the company
to respond quickly to shifts in the
marketplace (for instance, by developing
new offerings, such as Business
ByDesign on-demand enterprise
applications that target customers in
the small-to-mid-market space and in
emerging economies, and by acquiring
new companies) and support the kind
of consistency in reporting, business
processes and governance that’s critical
to global growth.
“Companies cannot survive anymore
in today’s global and quick-changing
environment unless they have stability
and consistency within their finance
processes,” says Peter Rasper, Head
of Global Finance Infrastructure, at
SAP. “We have to be able to react
quickly to market needs and customer
changes, and to do that you need the
same processes, standards and master
data globally. [Because of the shared
services organization], finance has
been able to help make such changes
happen very quickly.” And because the
shared services organization has made
routine finance transaction-oriented
activities more efficient, SAP’s finance
organization has been able to shift
its focus to more strategic, valuecreating
pursuits, such as facilitating
partnerships with other companies.
Another company that has experienced
the benefits of shared services in
an increasingly global market is an
international crude oil company.
This company wanted to establish a
foundation for further growth through
the integration of new businesses
coming from merger activities. The
company implemented a multifunctional
shared services center
focused on finance, human resources,
IT and facility management and
procurement. The objective was to
build standard processes across these
five functional areas, enabled by an
ERP system.
As a result of implementing this
shared services center, the company
has reported improvement of service
quality, compliance and control through
simplification and standardization of
work processes, which in turn helped
advance common corporate values by
uniting the company through common
work processes and systems. The
company also reported US$50 million
in annual improvements within the
function areas.
Complexity is another challenge
addressed by the shared services
model. In an interview with a finance
executive of one global services
company, Accenture learned that as
the company expanded its operations
into new markets and diversified its
service offerings, its deal structures
with its clients became more
complex, its workforce became more
heterogeneous, and the number of
its price points multiplied. Increased

merger and acquisition activity added
further complexity through the various
challenges of integrating people,
processes and systems. To address the
growing complexity of its business
while maintaining cost efficiency and
high performance, the company began
a major restructuring of its business
model that had as one of its anchors
the creation of a shared services delivery
center for finance. The focus of the
transformation effort was to develop
reusable and repeatable processes and
work streams, and standard tools and
approaches, so that the company’s
finance organization did not have to
reinvent the wheel on a daily basis.
“We did this because we felt that we
needed to develop a finance structure
that would allow us to respond to
the changes we make every day,” says
the company’s finance executive. “We
wanted to support the business model
without an increase in finance costs
or a decrease in service. In fact, we
wanted to continue to drive down
finance costs. This model allows us to
have a more stable foundation to make
changes as we grow and restructure.”
The company’s finance shared services
center supports both transactional and
analytical functions, and is freeing up
the finance team to be more clientcentric,
both with internal as well as
external clients. The company expects
to staff this shared services center
with 1,000 people by the end of fiscal
year 2008 and all indications are that
despite the investment in creating
the center, the cost of finance for this
organization is going down.
According to a finance executive at
a large pharmaceutical company,
their challenge was to be highly local
while pursuing the company’s growth
objectives. The risk was in increasing
the cost of finance, which was already
high at more than 3 percent of revenue.
Previously, the company had focused
on internal control and compliance.
Now its strategy includes a redesign
of the finance organization intended
to enable it to respond to the
complexity resulting from increased
globalization while delivering the
best possible customer service. The
redesign involves a restructuring to
embed small finance teams within
business units around the globe. These
teams will act as liaison between the
business units and the shared services
and transaction delivery centers.
The enterprise expects this strategy
to result in process standardization
through the use of global process
owners who will measure efficiencies
and drive continuous improvement. It
is also expected that this model will
better support the company’s growth
objectives because it will provide
finance with the local information
it needs to advise the company on
what markets and products in which
to invest, as well as making it easier
to share best practices across widely
dispersed locations. At the same time,
it’s expected that this will allow the
company to control costs, as previously
finance simply responded to each
business request as best it could
(driving up costs), lacking the rigor,
standardization and good management
practices to be able to take a holistic,
portfolio view of business demand.
Outsourcing
As companies extend their operations
globally, their success increasingly will
be predicated on their ability, as stated
above, to be both highly global and
highly local. Outsourcing is another
form of shared services, but with a
different ownership and governance
structure. Many organizations have used
outsourcing as a strategic move to leapfrog
the competition by enhancing and
magnifying the value it derives from its
own shared services delivery capability.
The challenge with either shared services
or outsourcing always is to deliver
better service at a lower cost. Shared
services operations that are focused
on service excellence can leverage the
opportunities provided by outsourcing
to move their high-transaction activities
to lower-cost locations, while at
the same time moving their frontoffice,
competitively differentiating
and customer-facing activities
much closer to their customers. In
fact, one executive we interviewed
aired the idea of reinventing a multicenter
global shared services model to
consolidate all transactional activity
into only three centers serving the
whole world, and then outsourcing
those centers to a partner. The higherorder
finance activities that require
geographic proximity to the customer
then would be split into multiple front
offices with very small staffs to provide
the high customer touch that may
have been missing in legacy shared
services solutions. This new in-sourced/
outsourced model combines the best
of shared services philosophies with
outsourced/off-shored economies to
provide a multi-tier services delivery
model that operates efficiently and
generates value for both the shareholder
and the customer regardless of the
center’s physical location.
At another company we see a similar
practice. In 2001, Thomas Cook UK and
Ireland found itself managing backoffice
functions across its three business
units—sales, tour operations and the
Thomas Cook airline—out of 22 separate
locations. In the face of competition
from new airlines and new Internetbased
travel service providers with much
lower cost structures than Thomas
Cook’s, the inefficiency of supporting
22 offices performing much the same
functions was threatening the future
viability of the company. With a keen
ability to discern the important drivers
of present and future value, the Thomas
Cook UK and Ireland management team
responded to this challenge by enacting
a far-reaching transformation program
to cut costs, improve margins and
integrate operations.
Although Thomas Cook UK and Ireland
has long possessed a sterling reputation
for exceptional service, as well as
a strong, well-recognized brand, it
still needed to transform its internal
processes and organizational structure.
A major component of its business
transformation plan was reducing the
high cost associated with its dispersed
and fragmented back-office functions
by creating a single shared services
center. The company decided that
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 13

teaming with a capable third-party
provider would provide the service and
performance guarantees the company
needed both to maintain its reputation
for service and to reduce costs. “We
knew that outsourcing would enable
us to create a single administrative
focus, with a single set of information
systems under the management of
experts,” says Carl Dawson, Chief
Information Officer, Thomas Cook UK
and Ireland.
Unlike many companies considering a
shared services or outsourcing option,
Thomas Cook UK and Ireland was not
interested in simply finding a lowercost
way of carrying out the same
business processes. It was looking,
instead, for an investment relationship
marked by shared objectives, in which
both risks and rewards would also
be shared. Specifically, the service
provider would help restructure the
company and be willing to make new
investments while driving out costs
from Thomas Cook's existing work
processes. Through this model, and
many other cost-saving initiatives, the
company within 16 months was able
to improve operations and reduce its
cost base by more than 30 percent,
removing nearly US$290 million of
overhead expenses from the business.
In this way, outsourcing becomes a
strategic driver of value creation—a
solution for delivering high
performance—not simply a tactical
tool for controlling costs. Since the
initial cost savings and performance
improvements, Thomas Cook has
embraced global sourcing to realize
further cost savings of 30 percent.
Thomas Cook has also leveraged its
outsourcing model to integrate the
back-office functions of MyTravel
Group plc following the merger of the
two companies in 2007 to form the
Thomas Cook Group plc.
ERP
It's no surprise that enterprise resource
planning software systems (ERP) are
a critical tool (a staple, in fact) for
integrating an enterprise’s operations,
for reducing the complexity of a
14 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
company’s legacy environment, and
for helping organizations get a better
handle on costs. The promise of ERP is to
enable an enterprise to obtain a single,
integrated view of its financial reality,
its master data, thereby allowing it to
better manage its resources in pursuit
of high performance and value creation.
Companies are expanding their ERP
capabilities and driving value from them
like never before.
The State of Ohio, which has one
of the most comprehensive state
government ERP implementations
in the US, is an excellent example
of how ERP can make a significant
difference in an organization’s pursuit
of high performance. Ohio’s ERP system
includes the state government’s entire
general ledger, as well as payroll and
human resources, and is soon expected
to absorb budget and planning. The
state’s finance organization, the Office
of Budget Management (OBM), is
the biggest user of the system and is
leveraging it to drive transformation
across all the state’s agencies.
The first step in Ohio’s implementation
was to get as much of the ERP system
up and running as possible, and the
second was to use it to eliminate
redundant systems across agencies. This
was critical in an environment where
tax revenues are declining and the
government must find ways to reduce
the cost of providing services to Ohio’s
citizens without negatively affecting
the quality of those services.
For example, prior to the ERP expansion,
a year’s amount of money would be
allocated to an agency immediately
following budget approval, but the state
had no way to track the use of that
money over the course of the year; i.e.,
no cash management. Ohio’s ERP tool
now enables the state to manage that
cash on a quarterly basis. The result is
that the state can now reallocate its
finances dynamically in more efficient
and value-added ways. In fact, with this
quarterly monitoring capability, US$1.2
billion was able to be reallocated to
better match resources to areas where
citizen needs were most acute.
“It’s hard to imagine how truly
revolutionary [this system] is for many
agencies,” says Pari Sabety, director
of Ohio’s OBM. “Using ERP, state
government can change the way it
measures its business processes so
that we’re aggressively managing the
enterprise rather than just kind of
passively letting it manage itself on
auto-pilot.”
The Finance
Organization's
Overall
Performance
Is Lagging
Even though the finance organization
is widely viewed as one of the most
important functions within a modern
enterprise, today, according to the
finance executives responding to our
survey, few finance organizations in their
estimation are performing at a high level.
Satisfaction with finance organization
performance, according to our survey, is
only slightly better than average.
Only between 9 percent and 16 percent
of finance executives surveyed indicated
that they are “very satisfied” with the
efficiency of their finance organization,
their workforce’s effectiveness, their
organization’s management of financial
and non-financial risks, its contribution
to the financial performance of
the enterprise as a whole, and the
organization’s track record in driving
enterprise-wide change (Figure 3).
The lack of satisfaction with the
efficiency of the finance organization
is not surprising when one considers
the fact that only 6 percent of
respondents said they have the
ability to measure “very accurately”
the annual cost of finance (by
which we mean the total cost of all
people, processes and technologies
performing in the finance organization)
and related cost drivers. This suggests
that not only are finance executives
not highly satisfied with their

Figure 3. Percentage “very satisfied” with the performance
of their finance organization for the following dimensions
Efficiency of the finance organization
Finance workforce effectiveness
Organization’s track record in driving
enterprise-wide change
Finance organization’s management
of financial and non-financial risks
Organization’s contribution to the
financial performance of the enterprise
organization’s efficiency, they lack
the data, and therefore the metrics,
that would tell them where and how
improvements could be made. In
Accenture’s experience, we have found
that without regular and accurate
benchmarking, it is impossible to
define these metrics, and without
the metrics that tell an executive
where their organization stands, it is
impossible either to set an end goal for
the organization or to chart a realistic
course to get there.
In terms of finance's workforce
effectiveness, risk management,
contribution to enterprise performance
and contribution to driving enterprise
change, finance executives reported
slightly higher, but still generally
average, levels of satisfaction. And only
a small percentage of respondents were
very satisfied with their performance
management capabilities and processes.
Survey respondents identified
numerous shortcomings in the finance
organization that negatively affected
their ability to drive enterprise
9%
9%
10%
12%
Completely believe they
have access to information
needed to manage
performance and create value
Completely understand
information needed
to manage performance
and create value
16% Executive
Team
value. According to the survey, most
executives do not have a full and
complete picture of how their finance
organization performs relative to
others. This lack of benchmarking, not
surprisingly, causes just 4 percent of
respondents to say that they know
their standing in relation to the
finance organizations of comparable
enterprises “extremely well,” while
only 25 percent say they know where
they stand “very well”. (For more on
benchmarking, see page 23.)
While half of the respondents said
they “mostly” have the capabilities to
support enterprise risk management
requirements, just 7 percent said they
have such capabilities “completely.”
Critical management information,
according to our survey, is not
widely accessible to participating
company managers and executives,
nor is it widely understood. Only
17 percent of respondents say they
believe their enterprise’s executive
team “completely” understands and
can articulate the specific type of
Figure 4. Access and understanding of critical
management information
7%
7%
12%
17%
Business Unit/Functional
Managers
information they need to manage
performance and create value. And that
percentage drops to 7 percent when
respondents address the understanding
of their enterprise’s business unit or
functional managers. Approximately the
same percentage of respondents—12
percent and 7 percent, respectively—say
they believe their enterprise’s executive
team and business unit or functional
managers even have access to such
information (Figure 4).
Finance executives also say that they
are spending too much of their time
dealing with operational details and
not enough on strategic pursuits. On
average, respondents say they spend
more than one-third of their time
(34 percent) managing finance and
accounting operations, but just 18
percent of their time managing the
performance of the larger enterprise,
and only 16 percent of their time
planning and developing strategies to
enhance enterprise and shareholder
value. Most finance executives would
like to see those numbers change; they
would like to spend less time managing
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 15

Figure 5. How finance leadership spends its time
Managing finance and
accounting operations
Managing the performance
of the overall enterprise
Planning and developing
enterprise strategy
Addressing workforce
effectiveness
Interfacing with the
Board of Directors/
investor relations
Overseeing enterprise
risk management
Other
1.7%
1.3%
11.0%
11.5%
9.5%
10.6%
9.2%
11.2%
15.6%
Today Goal
operations and more time driving
toward value creation (Figure 5).
Part of the problem confronting finance
executives today is that they are forced
into this operational role due to the fact
that in most companies participating
in our survey, key finance capabilities
are not sufficiently advanced to allow
the finance organization to operate
at the high level necessary to free
up the executive’s time for essential
strategic planning.
Based on our extensive research and
client work, Accenture has identified
16 capabilities that are core to the
performance of today’s finance
organization. These capabilities fall
under five broad categories:
• Finance Organization Management:
This includes finance strategy, the
structure of the finance organization,
workforce management, and the ability
of the finance organization to support
a value-centered corporate culture in
which the creation of shareholder value
21.7%
17.9%
21.4%
21.9%
16 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
34.0%
is widely understood to be the critical
driver behind all enterprise activities.
• Enterprise Performance Management:
EPM encompasses all the capabilities
required to manage and optimize
business performance across a single
enterprise or business network.
These capabilities include strategic
planning, goal setting, budgeting,
planning, forecasting, and performance
management and reporting.
• Finance and Accounting Operations:
These activities comprise the
traditional finance operations of
accounting, reporting, transaction
processing and the establishment of
internal financial controls.
• Corporate Finance: This includes
capital management (how capital
resources are deployed, preserved
and grown by managing the income
statement and balance sheet in an
integrated fashion), tax and treasury
management and investor relations.
• Enterprise Risk Management: ERM
is a top-down process that includes
the identification of risks, and their
measurement and assessment, the
management and monitoring of all
possible factors (such as market trends,
credit fluctuations, operating variances)
that can impact business objectives.
We asked our survey participants to indicate
how advanced their finance organization
was in each of the 16 capabilities
by selecting the most appropriate rating
on a scale of 1 through 5 (Figure 6). The
results show that for nearly all of the
finance capabilities, only approximately
one-third of the participating companies
could be described as advanced (a rating
of 4 or 5) in these areas (Figure 7). In
other words, two-thirds of the participating
companies are just average or
below across the finance capabilities.
This lack of advanced capabilities in most
key finance areas is making it difficult for
many finance operations, and their leaders,
to perform at the highest levels and
thereby maximize their contributions to
the overall performance of the enterprise.

Figure 6. Mastery scale
Finance Organization Management
1 2 3 4 5
Finance organization strategy and
structure
Reactive, informative Proactive, aligned with strategy
Workforce management Basic, general skills Deep and specialized skills
Value-centered culture orientation
Enterprise Performance Management
Finance governance role Intimate business advisor
Strategy development Less focus on value drivers Deep understanding of value drivers
Target setting No link to strategy, no distinction between high
Linked to strategy, full portfolio analyzed for high
return and low return assets
returns
Budgeting and forecasting Stand alone; time intensive Integrated; accurate; forward looking
Performance management and Little insight, multiple systems, simple, adhoc
Insight driven; current and future value
reporting
Finance and Accounting Operations
analysis
management, dynamic, scenario based analysis
Transaction processing Manual processing Outsourced/shared services, workflow management
and self-service capabilities, standard processes
Financial/Regulatory reporting Non-standardized; 15+ days to close Automated, standardized
Internal controls
Corporate Finance
Poor control, high risk Optimized, low risk
Capital planning and management No formal tracking, focus on profit and loss Enterprise-wide capital and investment planning,
focus on value drivers
Treasury Staff function Strategic focus
Tax Tax compliance oriented Intimate business advisor
Investor relations No systemized processes, separate, rudimentary
Reliable data, based on transparent and self-service
Enterprise Risk Management
financial reporting
reporting
Financial risk management No clear risk management goals; limited use
of tools
Optimized risk throughout company
Business risk and operational risk Poor understanding; separate risk management Integrated, enterprise-wide risk management
system linked with strategy and operations
Figure 7. Percentage with advanced capabilities for each finance capability
Transaction processing
Workforce management
Financial risk management
Target setting
Business and operational risk management
Strategy development
Capital planning and management
Performance management and reporting 35%
Value-centered culture orientation 30%
Budgeting and forecasting 31%
Finance organization strategy and structure 35% 35%
Financial/regulatory reporting 36%
Treasury 40%
Tax 43% 43%
Internal controls 46%
Investor relations 46%
23%
24%
25%
26%
26%
27%
30%
30%
30%
31%
36%
40%
46%
46%
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 17

Figure 8. Critical factors to achieving high performance in finance and
overall enterprise
Strategy development
Performance management and reporting
Value-centered culture orientation
Business risk and operational risk
Target setting
Workforce management
Budget and forecasting
Capital management
Internal controls
Investor relations
Financial risk management
Finance organization strategy and structure
Financial/regulatory reporting
Tax management and operations
Treasury management and operations
Transaction processing
Lack of Alignment
Between Finance
and the Business
Impedes Progress
Our research indicates that many
finance organizations within the
enterprise are not focused on the
key finance capabilities required for
high performance in both the finance
organization and the enterprise overall.
A key reason for that lack of focus is
the lack of alignment between what
finance capabilities respondents say
are critical to finance organization
high performance (Figure 8) and the
capabilities in which they are strong.
Overall, executives cited finance
organization strategy and structure,
performance management and
reporting, and budgeting and
forecasting as being most critical to
finance organization high performance.
However, only 35 percent of respondents
8%
8%
10%
11%
14%
15%
18 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
18%
21%
20%
20%
20%
27%
29%
28%
26%
24%
24%
31%
30%
32%
30%
30%
39%
38%
38%
43%
45%
rate their finance organization strategy
as sound, just 30 percent say their
performance management and reporting
capabilities are advanced, and only
31 percent indicate that they have
advanced budgeting and forecasting
capabilities (Figure 7).
Similarly, there is little alignment
between what finance capabilities
respondents say are critical to high
performance in the overall enterprise
and those capabilities in which they are
strong. Given the resource constraints
under which most finance organizations
operate, especially in the area of
talent and manpower, it is of utmost
importance that finance executives get
the most out of the resources they do
have, and that can be achieved only
by aligning the finance organization’s
talent with those areas deemed to be
most important to creating value.
Executives cited strategy development,
performance management and reporting,
and the creation of a value-centered
enterprise culture as being most
57%
52%
55%
49%
56%
Enterprise
Finance
important to high performance of the
overall enterprise. Yet, as just noted,
most respondents rated their ability
to perform those functions as below
average. Along with the 30 percent that
say their performance management and
reporting capabilities are “advanced,” just
27 percent say the same about strategy
development and only 30 percent rate
their progress toward a value-centered
culture as “advanced” (Figure 7).
Such misalignment is likely to continue
in the coming years, based on our survey
results (only one-third of respondents
say they are planning to invest in
advanced enterprise performance
management capabilities despite
the fact that most companies in our
survey lack such EPM capabilities
right now (Figure 9)). Only 33 percent
of respondents say they are planning
to invest in new workforce programs
despite their belief that attracting,
retaining, and managing the finance
workforce will be one of their greatest
challenges in the next two years (Figure
10). Only 42 percent of the responding

Figure 9. Finance initiatives planned for the next two years
Complete standardization to ensure that finance processes are
consistent across the enterprise
Develop and implement finance organization strategy, addressing
organization, processes, technology and alignment with enterprise
strategy
Implement or expand ERP systems
Implement or expand finance shared services environment
Implement standard enterprise performance management
tools, processes or technologies
Implement new workforce programs (e.g., leadership development,
retention, rewards/compensation, career development, performance
measurement)
Conduct finance benchmarking study to assess quality and efficiency
compared to similar enterprises
Implement advanced enterprise performance management capabilities
(predictive or advanced analytic tools, executive dashboard, etc.)
Implement or enhance processes and systems to address governance,
regulatory and compliance requirements
Implement advanced and integrated risk management processes and
technologies
Implement or expand finance outsourcing arrangement
Other
executives say they are planning to
implement an upgrade of their current
ERP systems even though 60 percent
say their organization’s complex legacy
systems and environment was having
a high or extremely high impact on the
finance organization’s ability to be high
performing (Figure 11). Finally, less than
half (46 percent) of respondents say
they are planning to develop and deploy
a finance strategy that addresses their
organization’s alignment with enterprise
processes and technologies, even though
they believe that having such a strategy
is the single most-critical factor to
achieving high performance in finance.
The impact of finance not being
focused on the capabilities that the
business needs is that the results of its
investments will be hit or miss. Indeed,
that is what the survey results show.
According to most respondents, the
initiatives they pursued in the past
two years to improve the finance
organization fell short of having a
positive impact on the company’s
performance. For example, of the 43
2%
16%
26%
30%
33%
33%
32%
percent that implemented or expanded
ERP systems, 54 percent reported a
moderate to low impact. Of the 40
percent that implemented or expanded a
shared services environment, 63 percent
reported moderate to low impact.
Two possible reasons for these shortfalls
is that the companies may not have
had the right skills or enough of those
skills in place to successfully execute
the initiative and that the decision to
pursue the initiatives may not have
been rooted in a solid business case,
aligned with the overall strategy, that
adequately identified the investment’s
expected return. These companies may
simply have been implementing what
they thought they needed without really
knowing how the initiative fit with the
enterprise’s overall finance strategy.
What’s the strategy?
The results just cited are troubling
for many reasons, chief among them
being the fact that finance resources
are scarce and should be aligned with
those activities and responsibilities
36%
35%
42%
46%
53%
that can deliver the highest return on
investment. Those scarce resources
should not be spent on maintaining
suboptimal systems and processes, on
managing inadequately performing
workforces, or simply maintaining a
status quo that does not maximize
enterprise value creation. Companies
need a robust finance strategy to align
finance capabilities most effectively
with the needs of the business, and to
avoid wasting time, energy and capital.
A formal, widely communicated and
well-understood strategy can help
the finance organization to define an
actionable vision in the context of the
business’ overall strategic goals.
To develop such a strategy, finance
first must be open to a rigorous
self-assessment to determine if it is
successfully meeting the needs of its
stakeholders and if it is contributing
in a positive way to overall enterprise
performance. It must be able to define
what capabilities are going to drive
the most value from finance into the
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 19

Figure 10. Greatest challenges for the finance organization over the next
two years
Building the finance capabilities needed to support an
increasingly complex enterprise strategy
Infusing a value-oriented culture throughout the enterprise,
such that behaviors, decisions and strategies are focused
on the common objective of delivering sustainable and
superior shareholder or stakeholder value
Attracting, retaining and managing the finance workforce
Simplifying the finance legacy environment
Effectively managing new and complex financial, business
and operational risks
Managing increasingly complex outsourcing and shared
services arrangements
Building the finance capabilities needed to support the
controls and regulatory requirements
Managing the increasingly complex needs of all
stakeholders (board of directors, investors, etc.)
Optimizing the capital structure of the enterprise
Other
enterprise as a whole, and understand
where it can become more cost-efficient
in its operations. It must engage in a
bottom-up and top-down review and
assessment of its activities, and then
benchmark its performance of those
activities against its competitors and
peers. Once it understands where it
stands in relation to its competitors,
a finance organization must have
access to leading practices in order to
appreciate what is desirable and what
is possible. Ultimately, the goal should
be to develop a model for how finance
should organize itself and operate to
support the needs of the business’s
customers, both internal and external,
while generating value for the
shareholder. This model should function
as a roadmap for finance’s future, for
change, and include an understanding
of those technologies that will help it
transform itself.
In creating this sort of comprehensive
and actionable strategy, it is important
that finance understands that what
an enterprise needs from its finance
2%
20 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
11%
22%
23%
26%
28%
organization is now, more than ever,
far from static; it is, instead, an everchanging
dynamic, dependent upon
evolving business conditions and
business goals, market fluctuations
and changing enterprise strategies.
In Accenture’s experience, there are
a number of factors that determine
what an enterprise needs from its
finance organization in order to
derive the most value from it, and,
correspondingly, the capabilities the
finance organization should have to
meet those needs most effectively even
as they change and evolve.
Accenture believes that the factors
that have the greatest impact on what
a company needs from its finance
organization include the scope of its
global operations (are they widely
distributed or largely localized?);
the velocity of the industry in which
it participates (is it high growth or
mature?); the current financial status
of the company (is it high performing
or not?); the level of complexity in its
37%
41%
40%
44%
operations (the degree of flexibility
given to customers and suppliers
with respect to terms, contracts,
product customization, etc., which
in turn increases complexity in
tracking, reporting and accounting),
and the current, albeit ever-changing
macroeconomic environment (are
markets rising or falling? is credit tight
or loose?).
For instance, cost management may
be more important to companies in
mature, slow-growth industries like
automobile manufacturing than they
are in newer, high-tech industries with
more digitalized products or services.
Conversely, in high-growth industries,
possessing advanced analytic capabilities
may be more critical to competitive
success, especially as the opportunities
to learn from other companies’
experiences (thereby adding more data
for the analytics) continue to expand
rapidly with information sharing across
industries and sectors.

Figure 11. Impact of key factors on the finance organization’s ability to be high performing
Complex legacy systems and environment
(finance organization, process, technology)
The need to support complex enterprise operating models,
making standardization difficult across finance organizations
Not enough time to focus on value-oriented finance
capabilities due to high level of manual work efforts,
attention on controls or regulatory requirements
Difficulty finding and retaining a skilled finance workforce
Lack of integration between enterprise strategy,
operating plans and performance management
Lack of value-oriented culture and finance acumen
throughout the enterprise
Insufficient funding to enhance the finance
organization’s capabilities
Inadequate access to appropriate performance
management information
Other
As mentioned, sophisticated analytics
likely would be more important to the
finance organization in high-growth
industries to help the enterprise
determine those markets offering the
best prospects for expansion and the
associated risks those markets might
present. Conversely, in more mature
industries where markets are more
defined and the risks better known, such
analytics likely would take a back seat
to identifying opportunities to reduce
operating costs to improve the smaller
margins typical in mature industries.
In the case of Fortum, the statecontrolled
Finnish energy company,
the finance organization plays a split
role between controlling costs and
enabling growth.
On the cost side, Fortum’s capitalintensive
business means that costs
must be contained at all times. As
Fortum CFO Juha Laaksonen says, “The
rule of thumb is that [if] the volume
[of business] does not go up, the costs
cannot go up either.” This means
Fortum’s finance organization must have
19% 41% 28% 11%
13% 44% 24% 18%
13% 42% 31% 13%
8% 27% 36% 25%
9% 25% 40% 23%
8% 23% 36% 29%
5% 20% 30% 33% 13%
5% 20% 36% 32%
14% 25% 17% 4%
Extemely
high impact
High impact Moderate
impact
the tools and data to do detailed cost
follow-up and drive cost control across
all the enterprise’s business units.
On the growth side, Fortum’s finance
organization participates in strategic
discussions at different levels of the
organization. For instance, finance is
an active participant in the process for
improving investment decisions and,
occasionally, “the finance organization
and the CFO must encourage people
to think outside the box and actively
encourage risk taking to pursue growth
and make investments,” says Laaksonen.
Overall, says Laaksonen, the key for
Fortum’s finance organization is to
achieve a balance between implementing
the controls and oversight needed to
contain enterprise costs and the strategic
planning the company needs to fulfill its
growth mandate. “There is an optimal
level of internal control that produces
the most shareholder value,” he says.
“Should there be too little control, there
would be leakage, but too much internal
control would kill growth.”
40%
Low impact No impact
7%
1%
1%
1%
4%
3%
5%
In the public sector, the factors that
determine what an agency needs from
its finance organization are different,
but the general principles governing
the relationship between finance and
the enterprise hold true. Aligning
finance with the overall priorities
of the larger enterprise is the key to
achieving those goals.
Again, the State of Ohio provides a good
example. The state’s budget is normally
built from the bottom up. Agencies
submitted their budgets and these were
all aggregated into an Executive Budget
which is proposed to the legislature,
moved through the legislative process,
and then passed to become the state’s
operating budget. At the start of this
process, the governor lays out the
agenda and the priorities. Now the
state’s finance organization, the Office
of Budget Management (OBM), can use
its ERP system to look across multiple
agencies and implement a budget that
will enable the state to execute those
priorities, in collaboration with the
legislature. One of the keys to the
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 21

Finance
strategy
is about
drawing the
roadmap that
guides the
enterprise to
its objective.
22 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
success of this process is that the OBM
is a cabinet-level agency and the head
of the OBM, Pari Sabety, is a member of
the governor’s staff.
“As the CFO in the governor’s executive
suite,” says Sabety, “We can align state
operations to execute the governor’s
leadership agenda” And Sabety says
she wants to continue to transform
OBM into a more strategically focused
agency, moving it from spending
considerable time building budgets
and recording transactions, to being
a critical partner in implementing
administration-wide priorities. Sabety
is moving the organization from being
“little more than a notetaker on the
business of state government to being
a nerve center—developing the business
intelligence to better assess financial
risks to the enterprise. We need to stop
thinking like a utility and instead, think
more like an investment banker.”
Another approach to finance strategy
within the enterprise is practiced by a
global healthcare company Accenture
interviewed. A finance executive
at this company calls it ensuring
“financial peace.” Rather than focus
on such granular issues as ensuring
that the organization has sufficient
controls over reporting, finance
emphasizes the systems, processes
and people it needs to ensure that
senior executives are comfortable
that the right governance, marketing,
compliance, reporting and other
practices are in place. “This helps the
general manager and others to sleep
easy at night because it tells them
all the things that finance is doing in
compliance so that when the general
manager has to sign compliance
statements, he knows everything is
in a good state and he knows exactly
what’s going on,” he says.
At a global logistics company, the
finance strategy is known as the “tip
of the spear.” It sits atop a pyramid
that has business process outsourcing
at its base, then business finance
transformation, and finally information
systems strategy and process design.
This company had undergone rapid
expansion in the past 10 years, mainly
through acquisitions. The result was
more than 70 finance locations,
an inflated finance headcount and
high costs of finance. They had
underestimated the complexity of the
acquisitions. They had become a global
company in the true sense of the word,
with operations and offices in many
countries across the world, but that
was just the good news. The bad news
was that they had disparate systems,
major complexity and inconsistent
processes and approaches. “It was
about as big of a mess as you could
get,” said one executive.
Part of their post-merger integration
strategy was to develop a world-class
finance organization that would have
a consistent vision but that would also
enable the three major business units
to retain autonomy. Finance was tasked
with delivering nearly US$2 million
in cost reductions and value creation.
The finance organization assessed the
current state of its capabilities and
developed a performance goal and
a future-state vision for each. Once
the opportunities were identified, the
transformed finance organization
believed that it had the potential
to deliver millions in value creation
and over 50 percent reductions in
finance costs and organization design.
Specifically, Finance expects to go from
a cost of finance that is over 1.1 percent
of revenue to a target of 0.45 percent,
and achieve that in three years. On a
revenue base of about US$30 billion,
these are significant savings. Between
savings and value creation, the value
proposition of the transformation is
about US$100 million a year.
Not only did the finance strategy
initiative provide the company with
what it needed in finance, but it
revealed where there were gaps and
weaknesses in other parts of the
business, specifically HR and IT. In fact,
this “tip of the spear” finance strategy
initiative provided both a model and
the encouragement for IT to undertake
a similar transformation. Ultimately,
the company reorganized all its

support functions, leveraging the work
and foundation laid out by finance.
In terms of the journey this company
took in its finance strategy initiative,
the “as is, to be” assessment was
relatively standard fare. The main
challenge was to develop a vision
that defined for the company and its
employees what was possible: helping
people understand what they could
aim for, the size of the ultimate prize,
what was achievable realistically, and
what was manageable. This process
short circuits the typical resistance
to transformational initiatives and
changes the enterprise’s focus from
cost reduction to value creation.
In all cases, finance strategy is about
drawing the roadmap that guides the
enterprise to its objective, whether it’s to
save money for a company with a costreduction
focus, or to increase citizen
satisfaction for a public sector enterprise,
or to create short-term value for a
private equity company with a threeyear
exit strategy. Regardless of the goal,
the necessity for a structured, strategic
process is the same: to make sure you're
sailing with, not against the wind.
Use of
Benchmarking Is
Not Widespread
As noted earlier in this report, most
finance executives do not have
a detailed picture of how their
organization’s performance measures up
to those of their competitors and peers.
This is not surprising considering that
in the past two years only about onethird
of the companies participating
in our survey have conducted a
benchmarking study to assess the
quality and efficiency of their finance
organization’s performance relative to
similar enterprises.
Benchmarking can be a critical tool for
defining the right finance strategy for
an individual enterprise as it enables
a company to gauge where its finance
organization leads, lags or operates at
par with peer organizations, thereby
allowing it to identify and address
the areas that most urgently need
attention or remediation, relative to the
competition. Indeed, our survey found
that companies that had conducted a
formal benchmarking initiative within
the past two years were more likely to
be “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with
their overall finance organization’s
management than companies that had
not conducted such an exercise (75
percent to 62 percent.)
It’s hard to overstate the benefits
that benchmarking can bring to any
enterprise organization or to that
organization’s leadership. By enabling
executives to gain a deep understanding
of the current state of the art in the
organization’s performance and costs,
the organization’s leaders can develop a
clear vision of the desired future state of
the functions within their organizations.
This will allow them to identify specific
improvement targets—both in terms
of cost and quality and impact on
their organization—through internal
and external performance comparison.
Once these targets are identified and
quantified, executives can prioritize
intelligently, planning multiple changes
to their organization, processes,
technologies and policies over time by
highlighting areas with the greatest
potential for cost control or performance
enhancement or both.
Benchmarking also allows executives
to create a detailed business case with
a combination of short- and long-term
initiatives to sustain a program for
improvement over multiple fiscal periods
and management reviews. By deriving
robust metrics from benchmarking
studies of peers and competitors, this
business case is buttressed by a rigorous
baseline against which to measure
the impact of future improvements.
With such a business case in place,
gaining support from both the senior
executive team and the business units
affected becomes much easier. Because
the benchmarking initiative includes
input (through interviews) from senior
executives and business unit leaders,
the current-state assessment becomes
more credible and defensible and the
alignment between the projected
improvement initiatives and the
enterprise’s goals becomes much tighter.
An equally, if not more important
benefit derived from the benchmarking
process is to identify the leaders
within the organization. Benchmarking
illuminates the differences and gaps in
leadership and practices across business
units and/or geographies. Once those
differences are revealed, established
practices become easier to replicate
across the organization and resistance
to change is lowered. Most importantly,
it is necessary to benchmark regularly.
Only through continual measurement
can a company get consistent feedback
on the progress it is or is not making.
Doing a single study, charting a course
and then trusting to the fates that
improvements are being made is a recipe
for failure.
One global conglomerate, for
example, wished to implement a new
business unit structure to optimize
its organizational processes, reduce
management costs and enhance
financial performance. Standing in the
way of this reorganization was the fact
that the company did not truly know
how much it was spending on finance,
nor how its full-time equivalent
employees (FTEs) were spread across
various processes.
The company conducted a finance
strategy initiative that included
(among other things) quantitative
benchmarking to develop a baseline
for the finance organization’s
performance. The company discovered
that their reorganization plan and
performance-improvement targets, as
originally designed, would have kept
the company in the fourth quartile.
Its cost of finance, particularly in
general accounting and transaction
processing, was unnecessarily high,
and the “low-cost transactional
processing location” it was
contemplating was actually expensive
relative to the rest of the industry.
Finding these baselines was invaluable
to the company’s leadership. Indeed,
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 23

the company’s CFO called it “exactly
what we needed.” What the company
also needed was a more aggressive
plan for performance improvement.
The company identified its ERP
environment as an area ripe for
optimization. It also reorganized its
finance organization and achieved a 10
percent reduction in labor costs.
In another instance, a US-based electric
and gas utility with more than 3 million
customers, embarked on an effort to
achieve operational excellence in the
delivery of business and corporate
services with the objective of reaching
the first quartile in cost performance
while providing consistently high levels
of service. As part of that effort, they
conducted a benchmarking study.
The benchmarking exercise discovered
that the cost of transactional finance
processes was higher than the median;
its organizational model and process
design was suboptimal, and, on the
bright side, it had the opportunity
to generate US$65 million in annual
savings within a three-year period.
Armed with this information, the utility
undertook a formal transformation
program that included several specific
improvement initiatives: accelerating
its financial close; redesigning its
planning and budgeting processes
and tools; automating work rules,
and implementing a new governance
structure for IT.
In the first year of the program, they
achieved US$15 million in cost savings,
and designed and implemented a new
shared services business model to
increase and sustain these benefits.
Another company, StatoilHydro,
conducted a benchmarking initiative
in 2005 that revealed the company’s
ratio of cost of finance to revenue
was less than 0.5 percent—making it
a true leader in overall finance and
accounting performance. However,
the benchmarking also identified
specific areas in which the company
could improve both in efficiency and
24 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
effectiveness. True to form as a worldclass
organization, StatoilHydro sought
to continuously improve its back-office
operations to remain ahead of the
competition and achieve its ambitious
growth goals. The company launched
several initiatives designed to free up
capacity in transactional processing—
not simply to reduce headcount, but
to allow the workforce to spend more
time on high-value activities.
In short, as these case studies
demonstrate, benchmarking can help
organizations set meaningful targets
for finance organization improvements,
as well as define the roadmap for
achieving those improvements.
Value-Centered
Culture Is Critical
But Not Pervasive
Executives participating in our
study believe that a value-centered
culture—one in which business
strategy is created, business decisions
made, and business processes
developed to deliver shareholder value
and drive value creation—is essential
to high performance in the finance
organization. In fact, just under half
of respondents to our survey say it is
one of the most critical contributors
to an enterprise’s ability to become
a high-performance business. But
developing such a culture is neither
easy nor simple. Indeed, infusing a
value-centered culture throughout
the enterprise was cited by 43 percent
of respondents as one of the three
biggest challenges they face as senior
finance executives.
The finance organization plays a
central role in a value-centered
culture, defining what value means
in the context of the business and
helping to inculcate value-based
decision making at every level of
the enterprise. Finance frames
how business alternatives should
be analyzed by championing the
goal of optimizing value creation;
finance sets the economic terms of
the decision-making debate, and
finance is (or should be) an integral
member of the decision-making team
that reinforces the notion of what
constitutes value.
According to our survey this kind of
environment is unfortunately not
pervasive in most enterprises. In only
29 percent of participating companies
is finance described as a close partner
with the rest of the enterprise, and as
having inculcated financial acumen
and imposed financial discipline across
the enterprises so that the company’s
behaviors and decisions are driven by
the objective of delivering sustainable
and superior shareholder value. In most
companies (54 percent), value drivers
are said to be partially identified,
but not well prioritized. Furthermore,
financial targets and budgets are
described as disconnected from the
company’s overall strategy.
On the other hand, survey participants
do appear to be planning to address
these shortcomings. Eighty-seven
percent of participating companies
indicate that their goal in the next 12
to 24 months is to achieve the type
of close finance-business partnering
that just 29 percent of companies
reportedly enjoy today.
A global healthcare company provides
one example of how finance can
help inculcate and maintain a valuecentered
culture within the enterprise
through close partnering with the
business. Their lifeblood is the research
and development that produces new
drugs. Therefore, controlling R&D costs
is critical to ensuring a healthy profit
on the drugs that they deliver to the
market. However, if they were to focus
narrowly on cost containment, the
development of new drugs, and the
speed with which they can be brought
to market, could be adversely affected.
“A large part of [finance’s] role,”
explains a finance executive from
this company, “is trying to explain to
managers the two sides of what is

Figure 12. Practices seen as most critical to effective finance workforce
management vs. percent of companies employing such practices
Regular and meaningful
communication occurs
A formal performance management
program is in place
Key processes are documented
and understood
Coaching and mentoring activities are an
integral part of everyone’s responsibilities
Industry benchmarked/competitive
salaries and benefits are offered
Leaders proactively build
relationships at all levels
Performance rewards tie to both individual
success and enterprise profitability
36%
Training and training materials are readily
52%
available to employees when needed
43%
Finance leadership encourages innovation
and provides employees with the
opportunities to share ideas
37%
52%
Critical Employed
happening and to try to hit that sweet
spot so you’re not myopically chasing
one metric, which is maybe a shortterm
metric, and destroying value in
the long term.”
The global healthcare company finds
the “sweet spot” by embedding finance
within the business, whether it’s
marketing, manufacturing, or R&D. “This
enables us to really have our finger on
the pulse of what’s happening in these
areas,” says the finance executive, and
that allows finance, and therefore the
enterprise as a whole, to make more
informed decisions about what metrics
in which situations are most applicable
to furthering value creation and
enhancing shareholder value.
According to a finance executive at
a global services company, “The way
finance operates (and helps everyone
in our organization operate), is in a
shareholder-value mindset. We educate
our people and help them establish
the link in their minds on how their
37%
44%
45%
44%
48%
53%
56%
56%
55%
59%
58%
61%
61%
decisions impact shareholder value.
People need to know that they can
drive shareholder value up or down.”
The finance organization in this
company infuses their value-centered
culture through many education and
communication channels, as well as
though the finance organization’s
structure. As is the case at the
global healthcare company described
previously, finance is embedded
within the business, again driving
the alignment between finance and
business leaders, and finance and
business goals. In this way, no decisions
are made in a vacuum; no decisions
result in one part of the organization
being optimized while another is
negatively impacted.
But to embed finance and align
finance within the business, finance
must possess a talented multi-
skilled workforce that can achieve
high performance in this challenging
environment.
Workforce
Issues Challenge
Most Finance
Organizations
Attracting and retaining finance
talent is one of the biggest hurdles
executives expect to face in the next
two years. “My greatest challenge,” one
finance executive told Accenture, “is a
human resource challenge.” And this
executive’s sentiments were echoed by
many others in our research. However,
the results of our survey indicate that
companies are lagging in implementing
practices they themselves consider
critical to building and sustaining an
effective finance workforce (Figure 12).
For instance, the practice that
respondents viewed as most critical
to maintaining a high-performance
workforce is having regular and
meaningful communication between
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 25

Leading companies view
finance talent as a scarce
resource and manage it that
way—carefully, and in a
nurturing manner.
employees and their supervisors
and other finance leaders. But such
communication occurs in only 48
percent of the participating companies.
Similarly, having key finance business
processes documented and understood
by employees is deemed critical by
58 percent of respondents, but only
44 percent say they have put it into
practice. Put simply, this means that
in over half of the companies we
surveyed, employees don’t thoroughly
understand their own business’s
processes, and in many cases they
would be thwarted in an effort to learn
about them because the processes are
not documented.
Our survey revealed even larger
gaps in other areas between what
executives know to be important
and what they and their enterprises
actually do. For example, 56 percent of
executives believe in making coaching
and mentoring an integral part of
everyone’s responsibilities, but only
37 percent enforce the practice. Fifty-
26 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
five percent of respondents believe
that leaders should be proactive in
building relationships at all levels of the
organization, but only 36 percent do so.
Encouraging innovation and providing
employees with opportunities to share
their ideas are viewed as important parts
of the finance leadership role by 52
percent of the executives we surveyed,
but only 38 percent say that such a
culture exists within their organization.
These are significant gaps, especially
when one considers that these
practices were self-defined as
important by survey respondents. But
when we examine a second tier of
criticality, the gaps grow even larger.
While nearly half of respondents (49
percent) believe that having a welldefined
talent sourcing strategy is
critical to the finance organization’s
success, such a strategy is in place
in only 16 percent of companies
surveyed. Similarly, 47 percent of
respondents believe a well-defined
talent-selection process is equally
important, but only 27 percent have
such a process in place. Even though
it seems that talent sourcing and
talent selection is somewhat loosely
structured in most organizations,
companies are much more likely to
fill finance management positions
from within the finance organization
(47 percent) than from outside the
enterprise (38 percent).
Companies seem to be struggling
to build competency models for the
finance organization, which may help
explain why so many businesses lack
defined sourcing or selection practices.
Just under half (48 percent) of
executives surveyed think that having
a formal finance competency model
that defines required skills is important,
and just 30 percent have such a model.
Even among the 42 percent that believe
having a formal finance model for
different career levels is critical, only 26
percent actually employ one.
What these figures suggest is that many
companies are not only ill-prepared to
compete for talent in the global market,
they are also at risk of making bad
hires, engaging people who may not
have the skills the finance organization
needs to support the strategy and
operations of the larger enterprise.
Just as troubling as the gaps between
stated beliefs and actual practices
is what a large majority of finance
executives do not view as critical to
high performance in the global arena.
At a time when competition for talent
is fierce, finding skilled employees
is difficult, and the pressure to keep
overhead costs low is intense, we
would expect finance executives to
be more interested in using shared
services or centers of excellence as a
way to address all these challenges.
After all, leading companies view
finance talent as a scarce resource
and manage it that way—carefully,
and in a nurturing manner. Without
achieving high performance in talent
management, it is impossible to
be a high-performance business. But
shared services and centers of excellence—which
can leverage the abili-

ties of skilled financial talent across
the enterprise to drive value creation
and high performance in the overall
enterprise—are viewed as critical
to effective finance workforce
management by just 35 percent
of respondents.
Again, given the widely acknowledged
and accepted fact that competition
for talent has never been more intense
than in today’s global and diversified
market, we would expect finance
organizations to focus on and invest in
training their own employees for new
roles and responsibilities, instead of
having to go out into that superheated
market to compete on price. However,
only 31 percent of executives think that
retraining is a critical practice.
With the aging workforce a growing
concern among companies in many
countries—especially those in mature
markets—one would reasonably expect
executives to be trying to find ways to
ensure that those retiring workers don’t
walk out the enterprise door taking
critical knowledge and operational
insights with them. And yet only 32
percent of respondents say they would
consider investing in a knowledge
management tool that would help
their organization capture and share
intellectual assets in order to prevent
just such a loss. And only 20 percent
employ such a tool.
In Accenture’s experience, the quality,
productivity and structure of the
finance workforce play a vital role in
the finance organization’s ability to
achieve its objectives and create value
for the larger enterprise. Finance skills
are the fuel the finance organization
burns. Without an adequate supply of
those skills, or without a sufficiently
high-octane level of skills, the finance
engine sputters, misfires and struggles
to perform at a high level.
To build the type of finance workforce
necessary for the enterprise to excel in
today's challenging global environment,
companies must address six key aspects
of human capital capabilities that are
especially critical:
• Leadership: the ability of those
who direct, plan and coordinate the
work of the finance organization to
guide the organization effectively in
accomplishing its goals.
• Organization structure: the extent
to which the finance organization is
structured to provide the capabilities
needed to meet the strategic objectives
of both the organization and the
enterprise to create and enhance
shareholder value.
• Talent management and human
capital efficiency: the ability of the
finance organization to acquire, develop,
retain and manage high-performing
individuals in critical jobs.
• Workforce performance: the ability of
finance employees to apply their skills,
knowledge and abilities to accomplish
an organization’s goals.
• Adaptability: the agility and flexibility
of the finance organization and its
workforce in meeting, accommodating
and managing both internal and
external change.
• Employee engagement: the degree
of finance employees’ emotional
involvement with and commitment
to their jobs, their work, and the
organization and its goals.
One company that has excelled in
managing its workforce is Vale, the
Brazil-based global mining company.
As mentioned earlier, Vale has made
several acquisitions in the past few
years, including Canada’s secondlargest
mining company in 2006. The
diversity of Vale’s workforce, and the
vast number of geographies in which
the company operates, makes close
attention to culture and workforce
development a necessity.
“For companies going global, there’s
a big culture issue,” says Pedro
Zinner, chief global risk management
officer at Vale. This, of course, is
especially the case where acquisitions
are concerned. “One of the biggest
challenges faced and where significant
time was allocated consisted in
mistakes we made [after one such
acquisition] was not giving enough
relevance to the people issue and
culture issues," says Zinner.
To help address those issues, Vale
employs a number of successful
programs, including a partnership
with the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology through which the
company offers employees the
opportunity to get a master’s of
business administration degree in a
short time; a corporate education
center with extensive training
opportunities offered across
capabilities; and an achievementoriented
career planning program
focusing on competencies. All these
programs invite the employee to
envision a long career with an upward
arc at Vale.
At a global healthcare company, there
are 1,200 finance people around the
world, all of whom report to finance
but are assigned to support different
business units or functions. This
approach enables finance to more
effectively support the business (as
noted earlier), but it also allows its
finance professionals a chance to
develop their skills and expertise along
a well-defined career path.
“If somebody is sitting out in Chile,
for example,” explains a finance
executive at this company, “he’s the
finance manager there, making sure
the business in Chile is very successful.
This is his primary measure of success.
However, he’s [also] part of the finance
organization—his career, his future, his
home is in finance—and the standards
and processes he works with are set
by me and the finance leadership
team.” This, according to the finance
executive, addresses one of his greatest
challenges—getting everyone in a highly
decentralized organization moving in the
same direction without tampering with
well-established and effective reporting
relationships—while giving the employee
the ability to move laterally or vertically
within the organization in pursuit of
career development.
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 27

Figure 13. Companies with advanced EPM capabilities vs. those without
Likeliness to have a problem with
access to critical information
Impeded by a lack of valuecentered
culture
Impeded by a lack of time to
spend on value-added activities
Satisfaction with finance’s ability
to drive enterprise-wide change
Satisfaction with finance
organization’s contribution to the
enterprise’s overall performance
19%
23%
3%
19%
6%
30%
Companies without
advanced EPM
capabilities
True Enterprise
Performance
Management Is
Lacking in Most
Companies
CFOs are recognizing the growing
importance of enterprise performance
management (EPM), a capability which
helps a company define and then
integrate its most critical strategic and
operational metrics into the business
for focus. True EPM is a comprehensive
and integrated approach that spans
across the organization. It is not a
point solution for individual business
units or functions. Without EPM, it
becomes difficult or impossible to
reconcile different perspectives on
performance, or to advance critical
cross-organizational partnering to
achieve overall business outcomes.
EPM is perhaps the most critical
finance capability for creating greater
38%
44%
44%
28 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
65%
Companies with
advanced EPM
capabilities
enterprise value. In fact, there is
clear evidence that enterprise-wide
EPM transforms the way finance and
its business partners work to create
high value from planning, resource
allocation, monitoring and forecasting.
In our survey, only 20 percent of
respondents described their EPM
capabilities as “advanced,” meaning, in
part, that they employ leading target
setting practices, they have replaced
annual budgeting with a driverbased
rolling forecast with financial
outcomes linked to the key drivers
of current and future value and they
employ root-cause analysis, corrective
action monitoring and other leading
performance management practices.
Those companies that describe their
EPM capabilities as advanced report
that they are six times as satisfied
than others with the contribution
of finance to the enterprise’s overall
financial performance (38 percent
versus 6 percent described themselves
as “very satisfied”) (Figure 13).
Current and future value drivers are
identified, prioritized and clearly
linked to strategy. A strategic plan
is then linked to targeting and
resource allocation, enabling the
enterprise to more effectively adapt
to changing conditions.
Companies with advanced EPM
capabilities are also significantly
more satisfied with finance’s ability
to drive enterprise-wide change (19
percent versus 3 percent); are less
likely to be impeded by a lack of time
to spend on value-added activities (44
percent of companies with advanced
EPM capabilities say lack of time
is having a “high” or “extremely
high” impact on finance’s ability to
be high performing, compared with
65 percent of other companies);
are less likely to be impeded by a
lack of a value-centered culture
(only 23 percent of companies with
advanced EPM capabilities cite a
lack of a value-centered culture as
having a negative impact on finance’s
performance versus 44 percent of
other companies), and are less likely
to have a problem with access to
critical performance information (19
percent versus 30 percent) (Figure 13).
EPM helps CFOs transform finance
to become a strategic business
partner and overcome two traditional
challenges. First, it provides greater
analytic capabilities required
to create, innovate around, and
apply insights that drive business
outcomes aligned with financial
goals. Second, it enables finance to
help in opportunity identification
and influence strategic planning and
investment choices and allocate the
right resources (people and capital) to
execute those plans.
One of EPM’s greatest benefits,
as noted, is its ability to enable
an organization to identify the
performance metrics that are most
critical to creating value. At a global
healthcare company, for instance,
non-financial metrics are tracked in
its performance reporting because,
according to a finance executive

at this company, such metrics often
provide a better picture of the true
value a company is generating. For
example, if a company just tracked
the growth rate of a particular
product, it wouldn’t be able to gauge
its saturation, that is, the percentage
of the opportunities on which it
was capitalizing. In other words, the
company wouldn’t know how its
market share was growing relative to
its competitors. “If you’re leading in a
market,” says the finance executive,
“very high-level financial metrics [such
as growth rate] are interesting, but it
can make you complacent.”
A company needs the right EPM
capabilities in place to boost employee
and management productivity
with predictability and control. The
productivity is driven by clarity on
the metrics, a defined end-to-end
management process for decision
making, tightly organized analytics
for insights on the metrics, and
management reporting and planning
tools that are easy to work with.
Together, these help create a deep
understanding of three aspects of the
business and invite participation and
contributions from employees and
management:
• How the enterprise competes.
Does it differentiate by leveraging
information and analytics? Does it
succeed by virtue of its forecasting
prowess? Does it seek to dominate
through multi-dimensional
profitability?
• How globalization affects the type
of analytics, monitoring and resource
allocation a company needs to
succeed.
• How far a finance organization
has come toward being a strategic
business partner as opposed to the
enterprise’s chief accountant.
Three case studies illustrate how
different companies leverage this
EPM-derived understanding of how
they compete to drive value creation.
A global retail superstore, based in
the US, had multiple business models
across multiple geographies. But while
the company’s management processes
were working for each model, they
were not as integrated as they could
be, creating complexity challenges
and adversely impacting performance.
They determined they could increase
productivity and make the business
easier (and less costly) to manage with
a renewed focus on how to create
shareholder value and create processes
and tools to drive that value.
The company also recognized that
there was a benefit to be gained by
abandoning the strategy of managing
each business unit exclusively by a
profit and loss because the financials
derived by so doing simply weren’t
providing sufficiently insightful data
for such a busy management team
and such a complicated business.
The management team worked together
to understand what was most valuable
to measure and thereby determine
what operational processes (such
as merchandising, advertising and
logistics) could be measured to improve
management and focus in turn toward
creating better financial results. The
retail superstore ultimately decided to
move to a metrics-based performance
management approach to get a clearer
vision of how well their strategies were
working and how well their operations
were performing. This approach provided
the management team with a way
to get insights more quickly and to talk
about opportunities and fixes across an
improved portfolio view of the business
baseline. In fact, the CFO says this capability
is creating competitive advantage
for the company. “Our strategic planning
process is a source of competitive
advantage for us. It gives us a better
roadmap, and through the process our
organization achieves a much more
robust understanding of what we
need to do. The mission of finance will
ultimately be to figure out how to be
high performing… to get better cost
and performance on key trends, their
drivers, and the actionable levers
management can pull.”
At a global professional services
company, the finance organization
recently developed an integrated
forecasting tool to support complex
resource planning needs, as this
company competed on its forecasting
prowess, which in turn relied upon
being able to accurately forecast
resource needs. But the company’s
previous forecasting capabilities were
lacking in transparency, integration
and accuracy, resulting in unreliable
predictive input for decision making.
Also, there were key aspects of the
business that the company couldn’t
forecast at all. All this created
operational deficiencies including lost
revenue opportunities, lower margins
and higher resource costs. In response,
the company implemented the
Integrated Forecasting Tool (IFS), an
application that integrates finance and
human resources and supports highly
complex business models in which the
supply of human resources needs to be
calibrated carefully to demand. With
the IFS, the company’s HR and finance
organizations now can use the same
data, the same timelines and the same
metrics and the promise of savings
and value is tremendous.
The three pillars upon which the
IFS solution is built include the
standardization of processes, policies
and procedures that increase the
forecasting capability’s accountability;
forecasting algorithms that improve
accuracy and consistency, and
the automated population of
source forecast data that provides
transparency in detail.
IFS is meant to improve decision
making by providing a standard
capability for all organizations
within the enterprise to complete
an integrated financial and resource
forecast using a single tool, and a
process that accurately predicts where
the business is heading at multiple
levels. This capability will provide
dynamic modeling that will allow the
business to evaluate the financial
impact of its business decisions in
a timely and efficient manner, and
use that information to make better
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 29

decisions going forward. Also, for
this company, by better aligning
supply with demand, labor costs
could be decreased and revenue
creation optimized. Based on an SAP
foundation, the IFS tool is expected
to give the company a substantial
competitive advantage.
A large global retailer is using EPM
principles to help drive a dramatic
transformation in its North American
business. With growth costing more
in the United States and Canada
retailing markets, this global retailer
has shifted to a new customercentric
strategy to balance the
cost of opening new stores with an
increase in customer loyalty to drive
higher sales in each location. The
key to implementing this strategy
effectively—and how they compete—
is by having the best analytics and
deploying the right tools.
The global retailer transformed its
central marketing organization to
prepare the chain for customercentricity
and refined its product
line but found that the greatest
challenge to implementing its new
strategy came from the field. A retail
chain, by definition, is decentralized,
making it difficult to communicate
a single vision of what it considered
excellent performance to each
individual store. They believed they
could leverage new technology to
help it scale the new strategy to all
its stores—but that it would only
make sense to do so after perfecting
its customer-centric retailing and
performance management models.
The management model would have
to come first because clarity on the
right metrics, processes and behaviors
would help the retailers in the field
learn how to think and act differently
before the company invested heavily
in technology.
The retailer’s retail, finance,
marketing and merchant
organizations worked together to
develop a list of balanced metrics
that captured what was valuable
for the customer-centric strategy,
30 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
and focused on creating examples
of winning behaviors that would
positively influence results. Because
of the sheer number of stores
affected, the company decided to
pilot the model in a small market
and then learn from that how the
solution could be refined, rather than
attempting a big-bang rollout across
the whole chain.
As it turned out, the pilot showed
measurable improvement in top- and
bottom-line results relative to the rest
of the chain, which convinced their
executives that they had a model that
would (and should) scale broadly.
Change Is Needed
in How Enterprises
Manage Risk
The extraordinary and proliferating
opportunities that arise in new
global markets come with equally
extraordinary and proliferating
risks. And these risks have changed
dramatically in both type and degree
over the past five years. Managing
global risk is not just a matter of
mitigation, compliance and control,
although these processes are
important. But using the information
a company derives from assessing risk
enables it to make better decisions
to drive growth. In this way, risk
management becomes a proactive
exercise in creating value, not a
reactive exercise in protecting it.
Before business was conducted
at internet-speed simultaneously
across multiple borders and cultures,
risk-management strategies were
relatively confined and operational.
An enterprise needed to adhere to
corporate governance requirements,
understand the financial risks of
their operations, and meet (relatively
limited) regulatory requirements.
Today, however, as regulatory
requirements have increased and
have been multiplied by the number
of countries in which the enterprise
conducts business, as operations
have become exponentially faster
and more complex, and as scrutiny by
shareholders and governments over
corporate governance structures and
practices has intensified, the objective
of enterprise risk management today
is to ensure that risk issues are
integrated into all enterprise decision
making. That means instituting more
regular and rigorous risk assessments,
aligning risk exposures with mitigation
programs, and incorporating risk
management into other corporate
practices, such as strategic planning.
Faced with today’s rapid pace of
business change, organizations need to
identify, assess, manage and monitor
the enterprise’s business opportunities
and concomitant risks in an integrated
and transparent way. However, we
found that a large percentage of
companies participating in our survey
may lack the necessary sophisticated
risk management capabilities
necessary to do so. Just 8 percent of
all companies surveyed indicated they
have a centralized, fully integrated
risk management capability that is
used uniformly across the enterprise,
and only 17 percent indicated that
they were close to approaching such
a capability (Figure 14). Conversely,
21 percent of the companies
surveyed reported their approach
to risk management contained few
risk management tools or a largely
decentralized, stand-alone and manual
(i.e., spreadsheet reliant) process.
The companies with the most
advanced risk-management
capabilities (the risk management
“leaders”) are experiencing a number
of important benefits and appear to
be in a better position to address
the risks inherent in today’s global
environment than those in the
latter group (the risk management
“laggards”) (Figure 15). Leaders are
more likely than laggards to have
implemented advanced and integrated
risk management processes and
technologies (28 percent versus 16
percent) and to say that this initiative
had a high or extremely high positive
impact on their enterprise’s financial

Figure 14. Risk management capabilities are lacking at
most companies
100
80
60
40
20
0
8%
17%
54%
11%
10%
Centralized, fully integrated risk
management used across enterprise
Risk management tools used, some or no
integration, partially used across enterprise
Some risk management tools
Few risk management tools
Decentralized, stand-alone, manual
(spreadsheet reliant) risk management
performance (35 percent versus 27
percent). Leaders are also vastly more
likely than laggards to be satisfied or
very satisfied with the performance
of the finance organization in the
areas of enterprise risk management
(81 percent to 21 percent), as well
as satisfied or very satisfied with
their company’s overall management
of financial and non-financial risks
(79 percent versus 33 percent).
Risk management leaders have
raised the visibility and thereby the
accessibility of risk data to a level
where it can be seen across the entire
enterprise and then acted upon. By
integrating risk information with the
business decision-making stream,
the organization’s performance
management dynamic changes for the
better, and enterprise performance
reaches a higher level.
These findings suggest an advanced
enterprise risk management (ERM)
capability is critical to success in today’s
global economy. Essentially, ERM is a
decision-making discipline that manages
Satisfied/very satisfied with
financial and non-financial
risk management performance
Satisfied/very satisfied with
enterprise risk management
performance
Companies without advanced
risk management capabilities
variation from company objectives.
Effective ERM focuses on transforming
the risk management function from
a series of isolated transactions to a
strategic endeavor that encompasses
every enterprise function, including
investment, finance and operating
decision making. Such an approach
helps companies enhance their ability to
employ risk capital, reduce the likelihood
of material, negative surprises, and
provide access to timely and accurate
information to allow the enterprise’s
leaders to make more informed portfolio
investment decisions. Doing so increases
investor and stakeholder confidence
in the enterprise’s ability to comply
with internal and external policies
and procedures.
ERM departs from the fragmented and
compartmentalized risk management
solutions already in place at many
companies by elevating risk discussions
to a strategic level. It is a top-down
initiative, and should be fully supported
by the corporate board. ERM offers a
holistic view of the enterprise designed
Figure 15. Companies with advanced risk management
capabilities vs. those without
27%
33%
35%
Companies with advanced
risk management capabilities
79%
to capture a variety of risks, and it
embraces the two critical facets of
any risk management activity: the
preventive, control-based aspect
focusing on negative events, loss
prevention and risk mitigation; and the
strategic and entrepreneurial aspect that
focuses on aligning risk and reward, the
better to evaluate risk-assumption in
pursuit of business advantage.
Companies that fully embrace
ERM are able to improve their
risk-management practices, from
leadership on down, and gain a
greater ability to understand the riskreward
equation in every decision.
Vale is a company that has
experienced the benefits of ERM.
To help manage the risk inherent
in its mineral exploration efforts
in 19 countries and an aggressive
program of mergers and acquisitions,
the company used ERM to raise and
transform its enterprise risk profile
(altering its revenue composition and
increasing its total debt from US$4
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 31

Figure 16: Finance masters were more likely to have undertaken the
following initiatives
Implemented advanced and integrated risk
management processes and technologies
Implemented advanced enterprise
performance management capabilities
Implemented or expanded their ERP systems
Conducted a finance benchmarking study to assess
quality and efficiency compared to similar enterprises
Completed standardization to ensure that finance
processes are consistent across the enterprise
Developed and implemented a finance organization
strategy that addresses organization, processes,
technology and alignment with enterprise strategy
billion in 2004 to US$20 billion in
2007). Vale’s ERM initiative focused
on three broad areas: market risk
management; credit risk management
and operational risk management.
The first area Vale tackled was market
risk, which was easy to understand,
easy to quantify and easy to roll
out—thereby promising quick wins and
making it easier to get executive buyin
for the broader ERM implementation
(which was achieved via a very
effective governance structure that
involved the corporate board along
with an executive risk committee).
With market risk management,
the challenge was to reduce the
uncertainties associated with market
risk factors specific to Vale’s new
acquisitions to minimize the effect of
market fluctuations on metals pricing
and essential supplies that influence
earnings and cash flow. The strategy to
mitigate these risks included improving
strategic planning and decision-making
processes with scenario generation
20%
17%
Masters Non-Masters
32 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
31%
35%
42%
41%
50%
46%
50%
54%
55%
62%
and cash flow project analysis. Vale’s
finance organization also improved
its capability to manage the volatility
of cash flow and its exposure to
fluctuations in local currencies. To
do so, it acquired more efficient
access to market risk related data and
information. With these capabilities,
the finance organization was able to
quantify the benefits derived from
risk management, thereby making the
company’s investment in ERM more
palatable to the executive board.
After market risk, the company
turned its attention to credit and
operational risk management. The
challenges in credit risk revolved
around Vale’s increase in its portfolio
of clients, both domestic and
international, and the importance of
being able to guarantee them that
the commercial exposure and credit
risk assumed would remain within the
limits established by the company.
To do this reliably, Vale centralized
credit risk, giving it more control over
company cash flow, and implemented
a single tool to measure and monitor
credit risks. This system gave Vale an
automated way to control and reduce
the credit risk inherent in Day Sales
Outstanding (the average number
of days a company takes to collect
revenue after a sale has been made),
the terms of sale and other risk factors.
To mitigate operational risk, which is
where most of the risk for non-finance
companies lies, Vale needed to increase
the sharing of assets and resources
across the enterprise, improve its system
for allocating resources, and enhance
its ability to monitor the risk exposures
that might translate into financial
operational losses. The solution was to
align business strategy with operations;
provide for a centralized allocation
of capital to cover expected losses;
define a corporate insurance policy
and control, and monitor performance
through an iterative and continuously
improving system.

Figure 17. How masters vs. non-masters allocate their time general masters appear to be more
focused on strategic business issues
than operational details, and have
100
80
60
40
20
0
37%
15%
10%
18%
9%
25%
20%
16%
15%
12%
Managing finance and accounting
operations
Planning and developing
enterprise strategy
Addressing workforce effectiveness
Managing the performance of
the overall enterprise
Interfacing with the board of directors/
investor relations
9% 11% Overseeing enterprise risk management
2% 1% Other
Non-Masters Masters
In these ways, Vale has not only built
a strong ERM capability, but in doing
so has transformed the organization,
giving it one of the business world’s
most value-centric cultures.
Leading Finance
Organizations
Are Rising to the
Challenge
As we discussed earlier, most
companies in our survey indicated they
had critical shortcomings in key finance
capabilities—a situation that could
be preventing finance organizations
from operating at an optimal level.
However, a subset of the companies
in our survey reported having more
advanced capabilities, on average,
across the five major capability areas
we studied: finance organization
management; enterprise performance
management (EPM); finance and
accounting operations; enterprise risk
management (ERM) and corporate
finance. We call these organizations
“finance masters.” We defined these
masters as those companies whose
average rating across the five
capabilities was four or above. The
sidebar on page 37 describes what
characterizes a five rating in each of
the capabilities covered by our survey.
It’s important to note that the
definition we use to identify masters in
our survey sample acknowledges that
mastery does not require one to be the
best at everything, but rather, only in
those areas that count. In other words,
simply having advanced capabilities
across the board does not make a
company a finance master. But building
superior capabilities that enable the
company to excel in those areas that
are critical to driving value for both the
shareholder and the enterprise does.
At a high level, the differences
between masters and non-masters
are striking. We found that in
a stronger enterprise value creation
orientation. Masters also have
invested in capabilities that are most
important to high performance in the
finance organization as well as to the
enterprise overall, and have generated
a more positive impact from initiatives
they have undertaken to build or
expand critical finance capabilities.
This, in turn, has made masters much
more satisfied with the performance
of the finance organization across
myriad dimensions.
Differences in approach
Masters have approached their
finance organization differently than
have non-masters—which likely has
contributed to their development of
more advanced finance capabilities.
For instance, a substantial majority
of masters (89 percent) report having
highly advanced capabilities in the
areas they also deem critical to high
performance in the finance organization
and in the overall enterprise. Finance
masters also are more likely than nonmasters
in the past two years to have
undertaken a number of initiatives
designed to develop or improve key
finance capabilities (Figure 16). And, in
many cases, these initiatives were
more likely to have had a positive
impact on the masters’ overall financial
performance than on non-masters'
performance.
The masters’ finance leadership
teams spend more time than nonmasters
on strategic matters and less
on attending to operational details
(Figure 17). For example, masters on
average spend 20 percent of their time
planning and developing enterprise
strategy, compared with 15 percent of
time spent by non-masters. Conversely,
non-masters spend approximately
37 percent of their time managing
finance and accounting operations,
while masters allocate on average
only 25 percent of their time to these
operational activities.
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 33

Figure 18. Masters are more likely to employ leading finance workforce practices
Practices Employed by Participating Companies Masters Non-Masters
Workforce performance
Global and local communities of practices (i.e., informal networks of people with shared interests) have been
established and are effective at sharing knowledge
46% 34%
A knowledge management tool has been provided (e.g., a database for capturing and sharing intellectual assets) 42% 17%
Training and training materials are readily available to employees when needed 67% 41%
Coaching and mentoring activities are an integral part of everyone’s responsibilities 54% 37%
A formal performance management program is in place 62% 60%
Critical feedback is provided in real time and is an embedded part of the finance organization culture 54% 33%
Career advancement includes rotations through various roles within finance 42% 32%
Finance competencies
Formal finance competency model is in place to define required skills 62% 28%
Formal finance competency model is in place to define different career levels 58% 24%
Formal finance training program is in place with a curriculum linked to developing required skills 33% 25%
Finance organization structure
Finance shared services are utilized 67% 45%
Financial Planning and Analysis division reports to the finance organization 67% 55%
Centers of Excellence are employed for scarce skills such as merger and acquisition work, complex deal pricing
or tax strategy
37% 40%
Employee engagement
Industry benchmarked/competitive salaries and benefits are offered 71% 46%
Creative benefits are offered based on strategic surveys of employees’ needs/desires (e.g., flex-time, floating
holidays, tuition, childcare, etc.)
58% 33%
Employee satisfaction surveys are regularly conducted and results are shared 71% 48%
Regular and meaningful communication occurs 58% 47%
Organizational charts are kept up to date and are easily accessible 62% 40%
Leaders proactively build relationships at all levels 58% 35%
Key processes are documented and understood 67% 42%
Role descriptions are clearly aligned with key processes 50% 26%
Performance rewards tied to both individual success and enterprise profitability 58% 45%
Workforce adaptability
Individuals are encouraged to proactively seek training on new topics and technologies 62% 33%
Finance leadership encourages innovation and provides employees with the opportunities to share ideas 71% 37%
Finance organization focuses on retraining the existing finance workforce rather than the hire/fire approach 42% 29%
Finance leadership provides employees the time necessary to complete training 50% 36%
Talent management
Well-defined talent sourcing strategy is in place 42% 14%
Well-defined talent selection process is in place 54% 24%
Finance management positions are often sourced from within finance 62% 48%
Finance management positions are often sourced from line management 29% 14%
Finance management positions are often sourced from the external market with experienced professionals 50% 37%
34 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets

Figure 19. Masters are more likely to understand and have access to information
needed to manage performance and create value
Managers and executive team
mostly or completely have access
to information they need to monitor
and manage performance and create value
Executive team mostly or completely
understands information needed to
manage performance and create value
Managers mostly or completely
understand information needed to
manage performance and create value
Masters
27%
Masters are much more likely
than non-masters to employ all
but one of the leading workforce
practices identified as critical by
Accenture, especially a formal finance
competency model that defines
required finance workforce skills;
finance leadership that encourages
innovation and offers employees
opportunities to express and share
ideas; a formal finance competency
model designed for different career
levels; the ready availability to
employees of training and training
materials when needed; a knowledge
management tool that supports the
capturing and sharing of intellectual
assets; regularly conducted employee
satisfaction surveys in which the
results are broadly shared, and the
documentation and explication of key
business processes (Figure 18).
50%
50%
69%
90%
Non-Masters
92%
87%
Finally, masters are more than twice
as likely as non-masters (46 percent to
22 percent) to make the discussion of
the enterprise’s value-driving initiatives
an ongoing part of all management
discussions. This helps masters remain
sharply focused on only those pursuits
that are most important to the
enterprise’s overall performance.
Differences in results
The proof of financial mastery is in
the enterprise value pudding. The
management team, the executives
and the line of business managers
in the masters’ organizations are
more likely to have a better handle
on the key data they need to make
better financial decisions, and to have
access to that data. For example, 87
percent of respondents from masters,
versus 50 percent from non-masters,
believe their company’s managers
mostly or completely understand and
can articulate the specific types of
information (reports and metrics) they
need to manage performance and
create value. Just over 90 percent of
respondents from masters, compared
with 69 percent from non-masters,
say the same about their company’s
executive team (Figure 19).
A similar pattern emerges when it
comes to the business’s access to key
management information. Ninety-two
percent of respondents from masters
believe both their business unit
and functional managers and their
executive team mostly or completely
have access to the information
they need to monitor and manage
performance and create value. Only
about half of non-master respondents
can say the same about their managers
and their executive team. Furthermore,
masters respondents are much more
likely than non-masters to believe their
management team is satisfied or very
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 35

Figure 20. Masters are more likely to believe their
management team is satisfied with the information they
receive to manage the three key drivers of enterprise value
Capital utilization improvement
Operating margin improvement
Revenue growth
Masters
29%
satisfied with the information they
receive from finance to manage the
three key drivers of enterprise value:
revenue growth, operating margin
improvement and capital utilization
improvement (Figure 20).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the master
group is more likely to have the
capabilities to support enterprise risk
management requirements. Ninetyone
percent of masters (as opposed
to just 56 percent of non-masters)
indicated that they mostly or
completely possess such capabilities.
Masters are much more likely than
non-masters to indicate that they
can very accurately or extremely
accurately measure the annual cost
of finance and related cost drivers
(63 percent versus 37 percent). And
masters are more than twice as likely
48%
59%
Non-Masters
36 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
79%
75%
75%
Ability to know well or extremely
well standing in relation to
the finance organization at
comparable enterprises
Ability to accurately or extremely
accurately measure the annual
cost of finance and related cost
drivers
as non-masters (54 percent versus 25
percent) to know “well” or “extremely
well” their standing in relation to the
finance organization at comparable
enterprises (Figure 21). These two
results strongly suggest that masters
are better positioned to identify
areas in their enterprises and finance
organizations that need improvement
and are more capable of pursuing
the kinds of initiatives required to
address them.
Finally, masters are better at
dealing with complexity and have
better insight into the benefits of
standardization. While masters
are about as likely as non-masters
to report that complex legacy
environments and complex operating
models have a major and negative
impact on their finance organization’s
performance (proof that legacy
Figure 21. Masters are more likely to accurately measure
their cost and know their standing in relation to finance
organizations at comparable enterprises
25%
Masters
37%
54%
63%
Non-Masters
environments bedevil everyone,
everywhere), masters are more likely
than non-masters (54 percent to
41 percent) to have completed a
standardization initiative to mitigate
the impact of that complexity. And
masters are more likely than nonmasters
(64 percent to 40 percent)
to report that these initiatives had a
high or extremely high and positive
impact on their enterprise’s overall
financial performance.

Defining Finance Mastery
The companies we deemed “finance
masters” were most likely to have
advanced finance capabilities in the
areas that were important to their
organization and overall enterprise. The
following describes what characterizes
“advanced” in each of the 16
capabilities covered by our survey.
Finance Organization Management—
finance organization strategy and
structure
A formal finance strategy exists
that addresses enterprise structure,
workforce, technology, sourcing, and
value creation strategies and priorities.
The strategy is closely aligned with
enterprise’s overall strategy.
Finance Organization Management—
workforce management
Finance has a comprehensive
competency model in place, and
educates across the enterprise on
critical finance capabilities/concepts.
Several effective workforce programs
are in place, including leadership
development, talent acquisition and
employee engagement.
Finance Organization Management—
value-centered culture orientation
Finance is a close partner to the rest
of the enterprise. Finance has infused
financial acumen and discipline across
the enterprise so that behaviors and
decisions are driven by the objective of
delivering shareholder value.
Enterprise Performance Management
—strategy development
Current and future value drivers are
identified, prioritized and clearly linked
to strategy. A strategic plan is linked
to targeting and resource allocation,
enabling the enterprise to more
effectively adapt to changing conditions.
Enterprise Performance
Management—target setting
Several target-setting leading practices
are in place that directly contribute to
meeting shareholder value objectives.
These include:
• Portfolio is continually analyzed
to identify opportunities to redeploy
resources from assets that are not
returning the cost of capital to higherreturn
assets
• Clearly aligned target ownership,
accountability and decision rights
• Targets are predetermined based on
external market expectations
• Internal targets are consistent with
externally communicated targets
Enterprise Performance
Management—budgeting and
forecasting
The annual budgeting process has been
replaced with a driver-based rolling
forecast with financial outcomes linked
to the key drivers of current and future
value
Enterprise Performance
Management—performance
management and reporting
Root-cause analysis and corrective
action are undertaken only when
key measures are out of tolerance;
corrective action plans are monitored.
Multi-dimensional profitability analysis
is performed on applicable dimensions
(market, product, customer, etc.).
Management information is readily
available and highly accurate to all
levels of the enterprise that need it to
support performance management and
decision making.
Finance and Accounting Operations—
transaction processing
A front-office mentality exists, which is
characterized by a focus on continuous
improvement and better service at
lower costs, and the leveraging of the
full benefit of shared services and/or
outsourcing when appropriate.
Finance and Accounting Operations—
financial/regulatory reporting
There is a focus on true decision support,
and fewer than four days are required to
close and report financial results.
Finance and Accounting Operations—
internal controls
Internal controls are optimized with
internal and external audits and
compliance monitoring, and with
low risk.
Corporate Finance—capital planning
and management
The company engages in enterprisewide
capital and investment planning
with regular tracking and evaluation.
The focus is on value drivers with
effective management of tangible and
intangible assets.
Corporate Finance—treasury
The treasury function participates in
strategic decisions around enterprise
risk management and working capital
management. Integrated and efficient
treasury management systems and
processes are in place.
Corporate Finance—tax
Tax strategy is a high priority and
tax professionals are integral to the
management team and/or strategic
decisions. The enterprise enjoys highly
effective tax management (i.e., full
audit trail and lower effective tax rate).
Corporate Finance—investor relations
A communications strategy and reliable
data, based on transparent and selfservice
reporting, are in place.
Enterprise Risk Management—financial
risk (market and credit) management
Risk management is centralized, fully
integrated and used across enterprise.
Enterprise Risk Management—
business risk and operational risk
(processes, people and systems)
Risk is optimized and managed as a risk
“portfolio” in the context of business
strategy.
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 37

Achieving high performance
is difficult for business under
any condition. In the context
of the multi-polar world,
the challenge has become
magnified.
Conclusion
There’s no question that the
globalization of business will only
increase in coming years. Companies
from developing economies will
continue entering more mature markets
in pursuit of capital, profit and growth;
companies from more developed
economies will continue looking toward
developing markets for new customers,
material resources and pools of talent.
Of course, along with opportunities,
globalization brings fierce competition
and ever-proliferating risks—this is
true for all enterprises, and especially
for the finance organizations (and
their CFOs) to which enterprises turn
to safeguard, manage and generate
shareholder value.
While one can only make educated
guesses about the future—its
opportunities, risks and challenges—the
finance organization can prepare itself
for whatever comes by building and
implementing the capabilities that
are most critical to the overall goals
38 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
of the business. To do so, a finance
organization needs a solid strategy—
informed by deep insight into where
it stands in respect to its peers and
competitors—to guide the way, as well
as the ability to accurately assess the
cost of finance and identify precisely
where in the organization critical
shortcomings lie.
Achieving high performance is difficult
for businesses under any conditions. In
the context of the multi-polar world,
the challenge has become magnified.
While the mere existence of a superior
finance organization cannot guarantee
that an enterprise will become a highperformance
business, there is little
doubt that high performance will
remain elusive to those companies
that are unable to build a finance
organization that can find the optimal
balance between “accountant-in-chief”
and strategic business partner that
excels in value creation.

Appendix
Demographics of Organizations
Participating in the Study
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 39

Industry of Participating Organizations
Health and Life Sciences 9%
Consumer Goods and
Services and Retail 14%
Transportation and
Travel Services 8%
Location of Participating Organizations' Primary Operations
North America 54%
National 23%
Automotive and Industrial
Equipment 8%
44%
Other 6%
South America 2%
Regional 11%
Africa 3%
Middle East 6%
40 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
Chemicals and Natural Resources 5%
Communications and
High Tech 15%
Utilities, Energy, Forest Products,
Metals and Mining 9%
Asia Pacific 7%
Public Sector 8%
Banking 10%
Insurance and
Capital Markets 8%
UK 9%
Europe (except UK) 19%
Percent of Participating Organizations That Are Global vs.
Regional vs. National
Global 66%

Size of Participating Organizations (in revenue)
More than US$30 billion 19%
US$15 to 30 billion 16%
Title of Respondents
CFO 28%
Chief Risk Officer 1%
President/CEO 2%
Less than US$500 million 6%
Other 4%
Treasurer 2%
Tax Director 5%
Vice President/Director of Finance 36%
US$500 million to US$1 billion 9%
US$1 to 15 Billion 50%
Director of Shared Services 6%
Comptroller/Controller 16%
Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008 | 41

While one can only make
educated guesses about the
future—its opportunities, risks
and challenges—the finance
organization can prepare
itself for whatever comes by
building and implementing
the capabilities that are most
critical to the overall goals of
the businesses.
About the Authors
Dan London is the managing
director of the Accenture Finance &
Performance Management service
line. He has extensive experience in
strategy, business architecture, systems
integration, business transformation
and outsourcing engagements
across multiple geographies and
industries. Since joining Accenture,
Mr. London has focused on global
finance transformational efforts across
industries and functional areas.
42 | Accenture Management Consulting and Integrated Markets
Steven Culp is the managing director
responsible for the Accenture Finance
& Performance Management service
line across Europe, Africa and Latin
America. In parallel, he also leads the
global Corporate Finance practice
within the service line, focused on
the areas of finance strategy, and
excellence in tax, treasury and trading
operations. Since joining Accenture, Mr.
Culp has worked with many leading
organizations to design and implement
leading finance solutions to improve
cost management and performance
management.
Rosanne Williams is a partner in the
Accenture Finance & Performance
Management service line. Ms. Williams
has over 15 years experience consulting
in the finance and performance
management area and is currently the
Director of Research and Innovation
for the service line.

About Finance &
Performance Management
The Accenture Finance & Performance
Management service line helps clients
on their journey to high performance
by identifying critical issues relative to
the office of the CFO, setting strategic
direction and successfully delivering
innovative solutions to transform their
finance management capabilities. We
offer a range of financial consulting
services, focusing on the areas
of Corporate Finance, Enterprise
Performance Management, Finance
Operations and Risk Management.
We have the breadth of experience,
global resources, superior assets and
deep knowledge and insights to help
the CFO create new forms of value.
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innovation, global reach and delivery
experience have made us a worldwide
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