Waypoints: Ideas and Insights to Navigate Enterprise Complexity

As we continue to explore the top middle market CFO challenges for 2017, it is clear that the CFO’s role is changing to focus more on providing strategic guidance to support the organization’s growth and decision making. Last week’s blog addressed how CFOs need to optimize working capital and to effectively accomplish this requires executing real time data analysis and predictive analytics to make the best decisions from the information that is available.

As we start 2017, I'm sure you've at least thought about making personal New Year's resolutions. Whether it's health or life balance or career advancement, the start of a new year is a perfect time to assess where we are as individuals. I'd like to suggest that it's also a perfect time to assess where we are as companies.

In the news lately, company after company has been announcing significant layoffs in their workforce. The reasons are varied, including centralizing operations at a corporate office, cutting budgets, experiencing an industry downturn or automating manual tasks.

Recently, my team and I were discussing an audit recommendation with a client. We thought it was a no-brainer – our suggested change would make the audit process more efficient and put less of a burden on our client. We were certain the client would love our idea because it would mean fewer headaches for the company in the future.