Limitless leaders: How automation fuels business ambition

While the theory that we only use 10% of our brain has been widely dismissed, many of us have been willing to embrace it as a truth because we know the feeling of failing to achieve our full potential so much of the time. Whether that’s spending only four hours of our working day actually being productive or knowing our capacity for making good decisions dwindles significantly as the day goes on, being human means we’re all burdened with certain limits. So, how can we maximise our talents during our peak periods and, ultimately, achieve as much as we possibly can?

This conundrum is why we’re starting to see more business leaders – especially CFOs – turn to ERP solutions with embedded artificial intelligence to both free up and maximise their time, helping make the best use of the productive hours they have available. When you consider that these leaders, like the rest of us, can only make a limited number of good choices in a day, then why waste that head space on manual tasks and lower level decisions?

To thrive in a demanding business landscape, organisations need their leaders to be pushing themselves where it matters, focusing as much as possible on the bigger picture and going above and beyond in their mission to get the business strategy correct. We need these people to be limitless with what they can achieve; and adding artificial intelligence or chatbot assistants to their ERP applications to handle less strategic work the game-changer, helping them do just that.

After all, CFOs are ambitious by nature. But, unfortunately, they’re still spending a lot of their productive hours keeping the finance function up and running. Requisitions, purchase orders and vendor invoicing won’t go away. But, when cloud-based ERP with automation comes with the intelligent financial management capabilities to handle these routine duties, it frees CFOs up from doing them. Brainpower during their more productive hours can then be spent tapping into their ambition and, ultimately, showing their CEO just how valuable a right-hand advisor they can be.

Timing is everything

There’s never been a better opportunity to do this than right now. Our heads of finance are in a privileged position, among an elite few with access to data pertaining to all parts of the business. This is especially the case as regulations and compliance laws become stricter, resulting in different business units, even within one company, putting access to their own individual data sets on lock-down.

And, if you’re one of the few people with a true oversight of connected data and processes in an age where businesses are driven by data? You need to ensure you’re taking every chance to make use of it. More CFOs need to take concrete steps to take advantage of this position, applying their productive hours and good decision-making capacity to the data they have at their disposal. After all, it’s this insight that’s empowering the valuable guidance they can give the CEO to drive the business forward.

Tapping into this ambition and becoming a strategic advisor to the board can manifest itself in a number of ways. Spanish football club RCD Espanyol has implemented Cloud ERP to automate its financial processes. Finance director Joan Fitó says the finance team has become infinitely more flexible since making use of the automation features, with productivity going up by more than 20%, reporting time reduced by 50% and errors reduced by over 25%. The team can instead focus on using Club information, analysing it in real-time to become more strategic in its effort to become a globally-recognised name in the world of football.     

With 80% of an organisation’s transactions processed in the back office, there’s a big opportunity to digitally transform and make the most of being more data-driven and automated. CFOs will find themselves even more central to the organisation. They need to make sure they’re in a position to take that chance right now.

The time has come to showcase their abilities by taking advantage of intelligent process automation, which can handle the labor-intensive tasks so they can make themselves limitless during their most productive hours, finding the insights that will help them put their head – and, indeed, their organisation – above the parapet.  An ERP Cloud with strong financial functionality baked into its automation is the way they can push these limits, taking care of the lower-level tasks for them, so they can focus their attention instead on showing off their real value in building a successful business.

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