Thinking

Here you’ll find our opinions, viewpoints and rants. But don’t forget to add your comments – good or bad – on anything you like or loathe. We value your feedback.

3 Procure to Pay Challenges to Overcome
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Procurement, Procure to Pay (P2P) and Global Business Services (GBS) Leaders face many challenges when it comes to the end-to-end Procure to Pay process. Cash flow, resource allocation, transaction volume, usability of the data they have, value of the technology …

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Data Driven Business Processes – “The Emperor’s New Clothes revisited?”
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The expectations on the use of data to drive business insights have sky-rocketed and whole new job categories have boomed as a result. But still companies are failing in their attempts to become data driven.

A recent Harvard Business Review …

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Balance Sheet Hygiene – The New Audit Hurdle
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Anyone would tell you maintaining good hygiene, no matter the place, always makes sense. Never has hygiene been a more current topic than it has been the last few months.

Good hygienic practices should be extended to your Balance Sheet. …

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What Does Digitization Mean for Risk Management and Control Post COVID?
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We have been talking non-stop about the impact of COVID on our businesses and financials since March. But where we were focused on what COVID was doing to our businesses on a day-to-day basis, we are now examining it’s longer …

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The Great Remote Working Conundrum: Be Careful What You Wish For
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The curve in the above diagram is one you are probably familiar with. It represents the common human psychological reaction to change, used to illustrate everything from grief to success to self belief. What is important to note about all …

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Has Covid Heightened User Access Risk (UAR)?
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COVID has forced organizations to change the way they work, from social distancing, remote working, furloughs, responsibility changes to disrupted approval processes and more. Even before COVID, our research confirmed that up to 20% of user accounts for financial applications …

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Is GBS Ready to Weather the Post COVID Storm?
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For over three months now, COVID-19 has been our one and only focus. It’s impact on our businesses, people, cash flow and future plans have dictated our everyday lives since early March. Yet, there is a bigger picture still; a …

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How Starbucks “Cleaned House” in Financial Controls
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Managing financial controls effectively is no walk in the park. Global organizations struggle to ensure that financial controls are defined, monitored and managed effectively across end-to-end processes, functions, regions and operating units.

Due to the obvious impact of audit opinion …

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How to Ensure that Operational Culture Does Not “Eat Your IT Strategy” For Breakfast
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When we talk about digital transformation, we all have different ideas of how to achieve what can be considered the impossible. And whilst nowadays better, faster and accurate data is helped by the new technology architectures, what sets apart those …

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The GBS “P&L Boost” and the Route to Fitness
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Let’s talk about cash. “Cash is King” right now and top of mind for all CFOs and Controllers. In the current environment, P&Ls are fragile things too!

On May 21st we hosted a webcast with Gary Steadman, Head of …

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