Breaking down silos drives connected finance operations

Seamlessly connecting your people, processes, and data helps to eliminate friction across your organization, breaking down silos to drive frictionless, connected finance operations.

Breaking down silos and integrating your finance and accounting (F&A) processes is crucial for driving enhanced business outcomes.

But what causes this barrier between teams – and how can you eliminate them to drive the Frictionless Enterprise?

A lack of common goals and information flow drives siloization

Different departments within the F&A function and the wider enterprise have always required different resources and levels of expertise. However, this often leads to different teams or departments (e.g., payments or HR) only focusing on their own goals, without considering how they can drive the overarching business strategy of their organization.

On top of this, most organizations suffer from a lack of structure created by the market’s shift towards specialization of role. Departments are often filled with people dedicated to just one role, such as queries management or payments, who are not encouraged to interact with the wider function or organization they operate in.

And the challenges don’t stop here.

Leveraging different supporting tools, technologies, and structures across F&A teams can further fragment an already extremely disconnected finance department. Take the record-to-analyze (R2A) process, for example. Its main task is to ensure all financial transactions and data across the organization are properly reflected in your accounting system, giving you a reliable view of your finances at month end. Your R2A teams will struggle to analyze data coming out of functions such order-to-cash (O2C) and procure-to-pay (P2P) that have their own, specialized tools to manage purchase orders and process invoices.

All of these factors create silos in your organization – but how do you eliminate them?

Eliminating silos through integrating your people and data

The obvious solution is to integrate your people effectively. To do this requires common business goals to be clarified and communicated clearly to your teams. Establishing the use of common collaboration tools across all your departments to exchange messages and data efficiently, transparently, and at speed can significantly improve accelerate your efforts.

Data coming out of your finance function is the foundation for sales, planning, and marketing activities. Breaking down silos requires data to be integrated across your teams and departments, leveraging the right technology to ensure data coming from different sources is orchestrated properly.

In conclusion, silos hinder the flow of information and data between departments. Overcoming this challenge requires you to seamlessly connect your people and processes, while also being able to address and mitigate every point of friction in your operations.

To learn how Capgemini’s AI.Controllership solution integrates with your systems and infuses AI into your processes to break down silos and give you more time to focus on insights, analytics, and your business partners, contact: malgorzata.bateup@capgemini.com