Organizations using true cloud platforms are best able to manage their finance, people, and data in a way that provides unprecedented transparency and agility that best prepares them for a future of growth.
Knowledge is power. With the increasing amount of data available to enterprises, that maxim has never been more apt. Yet CXOs need a smart way to generate value from the wealth of data within their organizations and understand the ROI of their data.
The future demands an enterprise resource planning system that was born in the cloud, conceived with built-in AI, and developed to handle third-party data in order to provide seamless interoperability between an organization’s various data sources to achieve greater insights, improve analysis, and create value.
Yet legacy ERP systems—with their origins in the 1950s—were known for their hard-coded applications, inflexible processes, and bulkiness.
Today, a cloud-based system—with AI already built in and offering continuous improvements—provides the highest degree of visibility over data that powers the business while also enabling business leaders to generate value.
A state-of-the-art platform allows CXOs to manage their finances and their people in a single system, not to mention adapt to operational and procedural changes and make data-driven decisions with greater speed, agility, and accuracy. In short, a modern ERP system helps to elevate finance, accounting, and HR teams.
By 2025, the data created globally is expected to reach an estimated 463 exabytes per day, according to a study cited by McKinsey & Company. One exabyte is roughly the amount of data created daily in 2012, 250 million DVDs worth of information, or one-fifth of all words ever spoken throughout human history. Another study by Deloitte puts the amount of daily data created at 149 zettabytes in 2024. (One zettabyte is 1,024 exabytes.)
Regardless of the exact figure, it’s clear that how enterprises handle, collect, store, protect, and analyze that data will be increasingly important.
Yet accounting systems of the past function largely like spreadsheets, which weren’t built to handle the amount of data modern enterprises produce, much less enable actionable insights from it. In legacy systems, the general ledger chart of accounts is configured upon deployment and remains fixed through their lifespans.
By contrast, modern ERP systems rely on an object data model that provides flexibility for long-term needs as the business grows, whether via mergers and acquisitions, international expansion, or other circumstances that require a new approach.
A state-of-the-art platform allows CXOs to manage their finances and people in a single system—and make data-driven decisions with greater speed, agility, and accuracy.
While some ERP providers push the one-system-fits-all concept, in the real world just about every industry has niche, best-in-class solutions that organizations will need to integrate into their processes.
In a world of continuous innovation, ERP systems require the ability—and agility—to “play nice” with other platforms. That means easily being able to provide secure and appropriate data access to third-party applications, as well as ways to extend the platform’s capabilities.
Since the reality is that no one ERP system can do it all and do it well, the capacity for integration needs to be built into the architecture of a financial management system, human capital management system, and other elements of an enterprise wide platform.
Traditional ERP systems were fine for backward-looking statements of how an organization’s finances fared in the previous month, quarter, or year. Reporting functions provided summaries that worked well for a time.
A modern system must also be able to incorporate whatever other data is relevant to the business, whether it comes from weather forecasts, a human capital management (HCM) system, or operational functions. Only by incorporating accounting data with other relevant information critical for growth can an enterprise truly establish a forward-looking, future-ready presence.
Finance leaders who devote resources to a few key elements will be well positioned to elevate their roles to that of a futurist, according to a new eBook from Workday.
Finance leaders should work to improve trust around AI to help improve adoption of the technology and enable digital transformation to achieve greater productivity, Workday CFO Zane Rowe said at the most recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
With the vast economic potential of generative AI becoming increasingly apparent, finance leaders are taking note. Deloitte’s recent “CFO Signals” quarterly survey shows what’s on their minds around benefits, risks, and barriers to adoption of the transformative technology.
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