With volatile financial markets, continuous supply chain shocks, and shifts in revenue, the role of a modern CFO is evolving. For CFOs, it is now more important than ever to collaborate with their CSCOs and take a more active role in planning business strategies.
Editor’s Note: John Galt recently held a webinar, From Insight to Action: How Civica is Driving Real-Time Visibility in Supply Chain Planning with Vikram Lamba, the Chief Financial Officer at Civica, expanding on the importance of linking financial and supply chain planning data for improved decision-making. You can watch the webinar for free here.
A Collaborative Role
COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on supply chains. As the global environment continues to change, this will require CFOs to partner closely with CSCOs to continuously assess scenarios and understand the financial impact of strategic decisions to build both short readiness and long-term resilience and drive supply chain visibility. With cash being tighter, companies must model the financial supply chain considering the impact to cash cycles which can be impacted by supplier reliability and customer payment terms.
“I do find that in most companies I’ve come across, finance always happens to sit downstream in the entire value chain. They do monthly reports, quarterly reports but most of the time, they are telling people the news of yesterday.”
- Vikram Lamba, CFO, Civica
Collaboration should not be limited to internal collaboration within the organization but expanded to collaboration across the supply chain ecosystem to include suppliers, manufacturers, customers, and beyond. Sharing one source of information on metrics, project progress and actions required to address gaps will help drive visibility across all stakeholders.
Let Metrics Drive Focus of Activity
CFO’s are slowly shifting from navigating uncertainty to recovery and growth. While modern technology facilitates sharing data between applications and disjointed systems, companies still face significant barriers in truly getting an end-to-end view of their operations without a digital planning platform that has a unified data model.
A comprehensive end-to-end supply chain planning technology platform can facilitate collaboration by collecting in real-time data across the organization and supply chain ecosystem and automatically consolidating it into a single unified environment ensuring decision-makers always have access to the latest information. Establishing a collaborative single source of truth enables teams to focus on strategic analysis and informed decision making driven by the metrics that truly matter to the business.
Adopting a Digital Planning Platform
It has never been more critical for CFOs to connect financial and operational drivers, use external data to make data-driven decisions and continuously model scenarios to help mitigate risk and reduce uncertainty. CFOs will need enhanced visibility into every corner of the business, not just finance, enabling them to collaborate with other stakeholders to optimize business performance.
“Civica’s digital initiative has partnered supply chain and commercial operations to gain new insights, become more proactive and drive tangible results faster with John Galt.”
- Vikram Lamba, CFO, Civica
Atlas Planning Platform enables teams to synchronize their plans in real-time, continuously model scenarios and collaborate across the organization and the supply chain network to make better and faster decisions and with more confidence. The Atlas Planning Platform allows CFOs to link operations to financial results and synchronize strategic and tactical plans over multiple time horizons.
About Atlas Planning Platform
Easy-to-use, AI-driven, Cloud Deployed Digital Planning Platform
John Galt’s Atlas Planning Platform provides a comprehensive end-to-end supply chain planning solution with advanced analytics and machine learning to automate planning, break down business silos and deliver greater visibility. Atlas Planning, a SaaS-based platform, transforms S&OP process; demand, inventory and replenishment, supply and inventory optimization, manufacturing planning and scheduling, financial budget and sales forecasting. To learn more, visit johngalt.com
