CFO Intelligence Magazine – Winter 2023
David Woodworth
insight software CFO
A large, U.S.-based silicon wafer manufacturer was expanding rapidly thanks to a series of acquisitions — and the company’s new CFO wanted to add speed, flexibility and value to the business’ cumbersome, legacy manual financial reporting process. “The company was looking for an automated solution to drive faster financial reporting and came to us for our Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software,” recalls insightsoftware CFO David Woodworth.
CFO Intelligence: Woodworth’s Take on Enterprise Performance Management
“They went live with the system in less than six weeks, and after one month, their team was able to reduce the time to complete the monthly financial close by more than a full day.”
Companies often “have a core source of organization-wide real-time data in their existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software,” Woodworth explains. “An ERP package ties in a variety of activities — like accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations — but it does so on a transactional basis, which limits its value.”
EPM software wraps around an ERP system, “and can extract insights from the raw accounting and other data, assisting a CFO and others as they engage in FP&A (financial planning and analysis) all the way upstream to monthly closing and cash management,” he adds. “By automating routine review and other activities, EPM software shaves days off the closing process, enabling executives to engage in higher-value analysis sooner with deeper intelligence.”
Woodworth notes that the benefits EPM offers are “more valuable now than ever, given the uncertain economy and continued remote workforce dynamics. At the same time, budget-conscious companies are pleased to discover that a cloud-based EPM package can be smoothly integrated with an existing ERP system, which minimizes costs and maximizes speed to insight. EPM software is also designed to be a horizontal solution with tailored, industry-specific modules of content, which makes it highly scalable. So as a client’s needs change, the EPM package can keep pace.”
With more than 30,000 client businesses around the world, Woodworth is familiar with the wide scope of companies that can benefit from an EPM system. “Our client base ranges from five-person nonprofits to billion-dollar-plus publicly held multinational companies,” he explains. “They’re all looking to tap into non-financial and financial data that can be combined with our analytics and predictive AI to yield effective, real-time dashboards and forecasts, so their financial teams can make the right decisions at the right time.”
As Woodworth sees it, “an effective CFO operates like a quarterback, calling plays to run and adjusting rapidly in real-time. Right now, the potential economic recession is the blitz play — and the CFO must quickly determine how to invest limited resources in a way that generates the best return on investment.”