Recently, we sat down with Christian Lanng, Tradeshift CEO and co-founder, and featured Gartner analyst, Desere Edwards, Senior Research Director, to explore how collaboration between procurement, finance, and AP can reinvigorate your whole enterprise. Here’s a brief overview of what’s in store for you in this webinar.
The siloed perspective
Finance departments are traditionally disconnected by disparate systems, metrics, and structures. The continued reliance on traditionally structured finance creates a siloed approach that limits the scope of an enterprise’s ability to strategically plan for fiscal goals.
In a siloed system, she notes, there’s no easy way to update or make sure information is accurate. If you’ve worked in finance for any amount of time, you know what this leads to: mismatched orders, mismatched invoices, and lost opportunities for saving money.
The opportunity to solve the disconnection problem is getting more urgent as the pace of business is getting more rapid, and more companies are investing in innovation and co-innovation. Edwards focuses on how procurement can fix their siloed approach to catch up with the speed of innovation. She explores why combining people, process, and technology creates a winning financial team that’s well equipped for a digital future.
The connected perspective
As the co-founder and CEO of Tradeshift, Lanng focuses on how teams can connect the dots between accounts payable, treasury, and procurement. Companies, he indicates, need to flip the same traditionally disconnected mindset Desere mentions.
He juxtaposes the traditional paper-based world with the digital-as-default ecosystem to explore how pushing paper leads to purely tactical work, while digital-as-default leads to more strategic fiscal planning.
Lanng focuses on the future of finance, exploring how the whole financial world might see rapid changes more in line with the digital innovation taking place in other industries. Any innovation in the field has to bring value to both sides of the equation, and in an ideal digitally-focused world, the goal is to bring value for everyone in finance. Part of that equation is getting sellers integrated more quickly into a digital system, and helping them get payment information sooner. More digitized sellers mean a better business case and higher returns for the buyer.
Get a handle on the future
Like the rest of the industry, you’re most likely grappling with how to assess what your system is capable of in a digital-as-default future and what upgrades you need to make. You want to know how to best reach across the department silos in your company to get faster insights with more accuracy, creating a team that feels empowered to make strategic decisions for the health of your enterprise.
Watch the video for a more in-depth look at the issues CFOs and CPOs are wrestling with as they decide how to make an impact on their companies for long-term fiscal health.
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