The main elements and steps required to improve finance processes

1. Finance Process Improvement
Ross Maynard FCMA
Ideas into Action

2. Your Finance Team are Expensive
• Your finance team are highly skilled and very
expensive!
• So why are you wasting their valuable skills on
day-to-day transactions?
• With increasingly complex business processes
come increasingly costly finance processes

3. Expectations on Finance are Increasing
• More complex business processes
• More regulation
• Faster decision making
• Finance must change to keep up
• You cannot just keep adding cost
• It’s time to look at your finance processes to
streamline them and improve their efficiency
• Whilst maintaining financial control!

4. All Finance Processes contain Waste
• Over time the “waste” in finance processes builds up
increasing the cost of the finance function without
benefiting anyone:
▫ Rekeying between systems;
▫ Incomplete information provided upfront;
▫ Hand-offs between teams
▫ Correcting and reworking previous errors
▫ Waiting for sign-offs
• There are two things which take time in finance
processes:
▫ Transactions – we need to minimise these
▫ Delays and Queues – we need to eliminate these

5. Where would you like your finance
processes to be ?
• Finance processes focused on the customer and
designed to meet specific customer expectations
• Work completed right first time, without a need for
backtracking or requesting additional information
• Information flowing through the processes with few
interruptions and little backtracking or double-checking
• Timely, relevant and accurate information
understandable by the end-user for decision making
• Supporting the resolution of process problems

6. Improvement is a People Issue
• The people in the process are the best placed to
understand its problems and constraints
• Processes are improved by people working together
using problem-solving tools
• Creating a culture of improvement is about people
feeling free to raise issues and concerns
• Improvement becomes the responsibility of the team.
Managers facilitate the team by provide support,
expertise and training as necessary

7. Most importantly: Work as a team

8. How do we get there?
1
• Choose a process to start work on
• Identify the purpose of the process for the customer
2
• Study and map the process in detail
• Understand the barriers to achieving its purpose
3
• Develop the process team to remove the barriers and fix
the problems
• Managers actively facilitate and support improvement

9. In Summary,
Improve your Finance Processes
Understand
the barriers
they face
Provide the skills
and support they
need to improve
things
Listen to
your People

10. Thank you
Ross Maynard FCMA
www.ideas2action.co.uk