Finance departments are tasked with ensuring that their organizations maintain a steady cash flow without succumbing to financial risk, putting the organizations in positions to respond to immediate business challenges and opportunities. Successful management of near-cash processes will also allow for future scenarios—such as an acquisition, divestiture or expansion—to occur without detrimental interruptions to the current operations. The midstream market is also particularly expensive to operate in and requires organizations to keep cash accessible, so that they can react quickly to changing market demands.

These challenges fall primarily on the CFO, who is tasked with managing cash flow, cost and risk and determining how best to keep processes both flexible and scalable to meet present and future demand. But to truly maximize efficiency, the CFO should align with the accounts payable department, which, if utilized correctly, can become more than just a cost center. From that point, finance departments need to undergo an effort focused on optimizing processes and pairing those processes with the right technology.

Optimize Processes

Optimization begins with identifying organizational process maturity and determining the best next steps to begin progressing. For example, if an organization is still using manual data entry, the next logical step is to digitize processes, moving away from outdated processes that are limiting organizational growth potential.

Digitization offers finance departments more visibility into daily occurrences, seamlessly across various systems of records that operate a variety of processes. Manual data entry is inefficient, error-prone, and it distracts employees from tasks that offer more business value, which can be used to drive present and future successes.

Once digitization is completed, the organization will be able to automate the digitized processes, which can, in time, be optimized to deliver even greater process improvements. Automated and optimized processes lead to improved efficiency, which saves time and allows employees to focus their time and energy on more complex tasks that drives even greater value for the organization.

The end result is that the organization is able to improve cash flow, and the increased visibility offers insight into financial processes, and most important, to potential risk. Having cash at hand provides the flexibility needed to successfully operate in the midstream market.

Embrace New Technology

As organizations begin to digitize processes, the chosen technology solutions need to be up to the challenge.

Embracing changes in the current technology landscape, such as the widespread adoption of cloud solutions and software as a service models, will help companies prepare for the future. However, while cloud service models certainly provide a modern platform that can host successful organizational change, these solutions alone will not fix a broken process. In conjunction with adopting cloud services, process change must also occur.

Once legacy processes are moved to the cloud, the next step is to adapt the processes so they utilize everything the new technology has to offer. Once that’s done, the organization is ready to take full advantage of its cloud solution.

Once technology and processes are aligned, inherent advantages become apparent, and processes become more flexible. Ensuring that there is seamless integration of cloud-based processes with the system of record, will result in less project overhead costs, helping to achieve the main goal of controlling costs.

One example of the benefits achieved by aligning processes with technology investments is evident in the increased adoption of applications on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. This technology has enabled users to add flexibility and functionality to existing processes in SAP implementations. The tightly integrated cloud solution offers organizations the possibility of quickly adding new capabilities to the existing system of record while lowering project overhead, which greatly helps facilitate innovation within the organization and helping drive business forward.

The technology is just one example of how aligning processes with the right technology implementation can work together to form an intelligent, future-oriented and flexible solution.

Long-term process improvement coupled with savvy, cost-effective technology implementation will help manage cash flow, costs and risk, and will ensure that the organization is primed for future success.

Brian Shannon is chief strategy officer at Dolphin, where he focuses on business processes and financial solutions to maximize return on investment.