The Hackett Group provides CFOs and senior finance executives with benchmarking, transformation and advisory services that enable objective performance evaluation and provide insights into proven best practices, as well as the design and implementation of high-ROI transformation solutions. These include:
Finance Strategy
Today's Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are concerned with everything from maximizing shareholder value to accurate quarterly earnings forecasts and developing the next generation of finance leaders for the company. They recognize that to be successful they must obtain, interpret and report critical information at an ever-increasing pace, while ensuring compliance across a dynamic enterprise.
As always, cost management is critical and driving efficiency in routine transactional processes allows a shift in focus to building the enterprise value of the finance function. This includes interpreting and advising on critical business information; managing/driving capital allocation and value creation; and a creating balanced view of earnings, cash flow and return on assets or equity.
Hackett works with CFOs to address the entire range of these challenges and help steer the organization's strategy toward creating a value-driven finance organization.
Organizational Effectiveness
Hackett helps companies maximize the performance of their finance processes while reducing their costs. Hackett uses proven best practices to accelerate the development of world-class solutions and to link these solutions to the overall business strategies of the enterprise, for the greatest shareholder return. Our experts help the finance function design and sequence key transformational strategies to assure effective and efficient execution of best-practice-based process improvement, including process elimination or automation, shared services deployment, and improved planning and performance management.
Working Capital Management
Freeing up cash from unnecessary working capital is the cheapest form of financing. Our working capital group, REL, helps companies implement solutions that balance the trade-off between working capital, operating costs and service performance. Our experts have helped clients free up billions of dollars/euros/pounds in cash freeing up cash that can be used other strategic initiatives. Utilizing in-depth process expertise, analytical rigor, and collaborative client relationships have enabled us to deliver exceptional return on investment in a short timeframe. Our working capital improvement efforts focus on the performance of three cross-functional end-to-end processes:
- Customer-to-Cash: as measured in days sales outstanding (DSO)
- Source-to-Settle (aka Procure-to-Pay): measured as days payable outstanding and
- Forecast-to-Fulfill: measured by days inventory-on-hand (DIO)
Globalization/Business process sourcing
No decision is as critical today than an effective globalization and/or sourcing strategy. Hackett leverages the insights and KPI measurements from our renowned database to achieve quantifiable cost savings and assess the value-added potential of moving labor from high-cost to low-cost markets, whether via a captive or third-party model. Hackett's holistic approach helps clients align their corporate strategy and business model to the appropriate sourcing solutions, identify which processes should be prioritized, and provides an experienced partner to help navigate site and/or supplier selection, transition and effective governance models.
Given the added risk of longer, more complicated supply chains, changing or varied regulatory environments and local management practices, Hackett consultants work with the CFO to ensure that globalization does not adversely impact on the ability of the organization to maintain effective compliance and clear visibility into global enterprise performance management.
Planning and Performance Management (PPM)
Whether referred to as PPM or Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), the need for effective planning, forecasting and management of the business has never been greater. Hackett's research shows that even though companies risk being punished in the marketplace when they miss their earnings targets, most firms fail to "get it right." The advent of very sophisticated tools has provided the capability to strengthen this critical area, but most firms have failed to institute the appropriate processes that support and enable the technology to provide the benefits possible. Hackett works with finance, planning and controlling executives to build linked processes that ensure the right KPIs and metrics are being utilized, that timing of planning events matches the business cycles and that early indicators are used to identify shifts in key forecasted components.
Compliance
Faced with a constantly changing regulatory environment, today's CFOs need to mitigate the risk of non-compliance without raising function costs. Hackett consultants identify best practice ways that organizations can simplify compliance processes, plus reduce the cost and risk of errors in compliance activities locally and globally.
For more information on any of the Advisory Programs, Benchmarking Programs, or Transformation Programs, contact us.
