Bayer – Notes on a Record-to-Report Transformation Journey

Host Stephen Ferguson, who leads The Hackett Group’s Account-to-Report Advisory Program in Europe, talks with Andreas Beier, Head of Record-to-Report & Change for Bayer. Mr. Beier details Bayer’s record-to-report transformation, and how the company has dramatically streamlined and standardized R2R in order to enable better insights and faster decision making.

Show Notes

Tune in to this episode of the Business Excelleration Podcast—hosted by The Hackett Group, a global leader in defining and enabling world-class performance. Hearing from the top experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours, and celebrate milestones, this episode focuses in on finance and the CFO Agenda for 2021. How can finance work to improve the strategic business advisory role and analytic modeling capabilities? Learn the importance of understanding and establishing what a business needs from finance, and then develop processes around these requirements.

Andreas Beier leads the Global Records and Reports Organization for the Bayer Group. He realized many organizations were dealing with data and wanted to bring one solution to partners and stakeholders to offer them data and insight that focused on the output. The goal was improving upon the holistic end to end process and offer speed and enablement for decision making. To accomplish this goal, putting the right leadership team in place was crucial in getting stakeholders on board.

To make this transformation, Andreas had to create a compelling story that communicated his vision and the steps he’d take to get there. Then, the key people had to be brought in to help bring the vision to life. Once the people and steps were in place, Andreas says you have to reduce the complexity of the plan by simplifying, standardizing, and then automating. Finally, you have to really understand the system and work with IT to go digital.

Andreas’ advice for others who want to take big steps is to have a good story and strong vision. He also stresses that the timing must be right, and an understanding of the goals of your organization and CEO. Having the support of keyholders can also be incredibly important. Then he recommends setting aggressive targets and showing you’re able to deliver on your promises. You alone will not achieve big goals, so make sure you have strong leadership at your organization and build a strong team.

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Timestamps:

• 1:05 – Stephen introduces today’s guest, Andreas Beier.
• 2:03 – What began the RtoR transformation at Bayer?
• 4:19 – Who was involved in this decision?
• 5:37 – Andreas explains the steps to making this transformation.
• 9:35 – Andreas advice for taking bold steps.