The finance transformation journey: CFO spotlight

Adam Hello and welcome to PwC Canada's newest podcast, Finance in 15, a series that explores finance transformation and what it means for leaders in the finance function. My name is Adam Boutros and I'm your host. 

Adam Hi, everybody, I hope you enjoyed our first episode where we had a foundational discussion about what the future of finance is. For our second part, I'm welcoming back PwC Canada's finance transformation leader, Samir Bishara. And we're diving further into what organizations are actually doing about transformation. Joining us is Alaina Tennison, CFO of PwC Canada. They will speak to PwC's own finance transformation journey. Welcome, Samir  and Alaina.

Alaina Thank you very much, Adam. Great to be here today with you and Samir.

Samir Thank you, Adam. Good to be back.

Adam All right, let's get started. Alaina, can you give us some background on PwC's finance transformation journey? When did it start and what was the opportunity that prompted you to get going?

Alaina We really started this journey a few years ago. And what we discovered is we were doing some really cool things for our clients, but not ourselves. And so, for example, we were, we engaged Samir, and we found that while, as you would expect, our controllership processes, our financial reporting was all in good shape, everything was well controlled. But we had some opportunities, such as on our business planning, our analysis, our insights. Samir and his team were doing some really cool things with our clients that we needed to be taking advantage of for our own business as well.

Adam So, Samir, definitely not a small task. A lot of partners across PwC interested in seeing how this played out. Maybe you could discuss where we started and why.

Samir We started working closely with the Alaina and our CEO, Nicolas Marcoux, and the leadership team in defining the North Star for what do we want our finance team to be doing on the areas of business partnering, which encompass the financial reporting, the management reporting and that whole analysis. We found out very quickly that too much time was spent on gathering data as opposed to analyzing and allowing for decision support. And it was more about steering the ship, but making sure that, you know, not only where we're going, but how we're going to get there and having the flexibility to do that. So moving away from Excel jockeying and it started from top of the house and cascaded right throughout the organization.

Adam Yeah. And just to push further on the throughout the organization comment, sometimes change can be hard for people and this is definitely a significant amount of change that we've gone through. So, Alaina, could you describe for us how your finance staff handled all of the change, especially when we're talking about processes changing that can be very disruptive and sometimes create anxiety for people?

Alaina Oh, absolutely. And people were nervous. Any time you're moving away from a business as usual process into trying something new, it creates anxiety within the system. So we were open and honest with our people and really looked at it as an opportunity for them. It was a bit rough off the start when some of our staff were like, does this mean I'm not going to have a job? You're looking at different automation tools. What I used to be doing is now being automated. But ultimately, when we said to them, like, what are the aspects of your job that you really don't like? Where do you think there's some opportunity to do something different and try new things and focus your time on the really higher value add activities? Then we got some real excitement from the group. Everybody's got things that they don't like. I couldn't promise to get rid of all of them, but once they saw some opportunities, we created some early automations, we created some early process changes. They saw the benefit. They saw how it freed them up to do more value add activities. Since then, there's been really, I'd say, an explosion of idea generation positive change management where people are wanting to do something different because now they feel that they feel safe.

Adam Yeah, that's awesome. And that's when it starts to really get exciting when people actually see the change happening. Could you give some examples of that kind of concept of shifting to higher value activities? What are some of the things that you've seen in practice?

Alaina A great example that I like to give is on our billing and collection team and we issue hundreds of thousands of bills a year, some of them big, some of them very small, and those were previously all issued by and through individual partners, working with their teams and working with what we called a billing administrator to process those bills. And so we've now, working with Samir and the team, we've fully automated the billing process and has ultimately led to our billing administrators being able to focus on things such as collection areas, such as opportunities within billing. And we've seen a real reduction in our what we call our client investment, days outstanding. So our overall investment on our balance sheet has really freed up a lot of capital for us, which is great.

Adam That's excellent. And Samir, any example that comes to mind for you?

Samir Another example that we worked very closely with Alaina and the team is around our planning, budgeting and reporting cycle and looking at it as an end to end cycle, starting by reporting say, OK, what are the KPIs that we use to measure our business? How does that support decision making? What are the decisions we need to make and working backwards from there to define what the planning and budgeting processes should be, what information they should capture and compare those to the actuals that are in the system. So very much an exciting process and it is prevalent not only for PwC, but for all of our clients.

Adam All right. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, we've covered all the good stuff so far. I think people also like to hear about some of the obstacles, the battle stories. So why don't we share a little bit there? Samir do you want to start maybe the biggest obstacle that you've you encountered and and how you went about overcoming it?

Samir One of the key challenges was stakeholder engagement. Everyone is busy. Everyone has so many things on their plates. So it's not that the partners and executives did not have the time for this, but, and it's not that they didn't buy into it, but it was just saying, OK, I'm going to get the right people, I'm going to commit to making this happen. So it was almost a mindshift and that once that happened, it was all magic from there. The second key challenge was around the data and data is like gold and we have to just refine it and make sure that it's giving us what it needs to do. So working with the end in mind, understanding those KPIs and saying, OK, where in our ecosystem, where in our architecture, does this data reside to try and avoid the whole reliance on Excel and those manual inputs that we are so reliant on.

Adam All right. Got it. Get your data right. That's seems like a great area to focus. So Samir, you've been running the project on a day to day level. How about one thing to leave the audience for a successful finance transformation?

Samir Definitely leadership and ownership. So this project was successful and it was a journey because of Alaina's leadership and commitment to make it work. So what does that mean? Decisions needed to be made on a timely basis. We all understood that there's work to be done. We're not going to go for perfection right away. And as long as there's continuous improvement and a move towards our end state and that we had leadership support and all the obstacles being taken care of and managed, that's what it really comes down to.

Adam You know, we always say this is an ongoing journey and transformation never really ends. So with that in mind, Alaina, what's next in your finance transformation journey?

Alaina We are attempting to solve our data issues. And while, like I said, when I say data issues, it's just our data is not optimized. We spend a lot of time processing it, moving things around, checking source information, one system to another. So what I've done is I've hired another one of our professionals, one of our partners an EVA who work with our one analytics team. Again, she's providing advice to clients on data governance, data strategy, data optimization and how to use data and create analytics and insights in their businesses. So I've hired her as well to advise us on the creation of a data analytics and management center of excellence. So I'm really excited. We're doing a 12 week sprint on that that started last week and really excited to see the outcome of that.

Adam Yeah, that sounds really exciting. And could you go a little further on that, because I think a lot of people will be interested in sort of exploring that concept, who's involved in the governance and in setting that up? Like who has input into setting up a data center of excellence?

Alaina Yeah, and we're we're really looking at our own PwC data here. So some of it is client related data. So client addresses, information, for example, that we use in Billings. We're also looking at other data sources such as our our financial data. We're looking at our human capital data. We're looking at our real estate data. So there are lots of different inputs required from across the organization. And so we've got input from everybody on that, including legal because data privacy and data access management security is obviously important as well. And so that's how there's a team that's come together. It's, I think, a agile team. And we'll be working together closely for the next now down to 11 weeks.

Adam That's exciting. And Samir, maybe you can offer some insights dealing with groups that come from such diverse backgrounds, even within an organization. There's a lot of strong opinions in the room. How do you go about getting people on the same page through something like a finance transformation?

Samir It's a good question, Adam. I would say by first understanding where we are today and where we want to go, in many cases, it's not about getting people aligned. It's for the organizations to step back and say, yes, this is important, we are doing something about it and we are doing it now.

Adam So Alaina, a lot of the clients that we work with, they come across detractors in these projects. Everybody, strangely enough, is not on board right away and up front. Could you tell us about whether you had any detractors on your journey and what you did about it?

Alaina \ I wouldn't even call them maybe detractors, but some people who were maybe not supportive initially of what we were trying to achieve and some of the changes we were trying to make. So, for example, we would have people who, you know, a lot of people and especially, you know, senior levels, they like their report, their certain way in their template and may be a bit resistant to change. But we really came at it. It was a tone at the top. Our entire Canadian leadership team and our extended leadership team was highly supportive of the project. And we engage them very early on in our project and through various touch points so that our once at once our senior leadership team was engaged, focused and agreed with the direction we were going. We very much had the ripple effect, we call it, where that filters down to the rest of the organization. And it helped anyone who may have been uncertain about whether they wanted to get on board. It really helped them with embracing the project and understanding the value that it would bring to them as well.

Adam All right. I'm glad I didn't voice any objections upfront that wouldn't have ended well for me. Samir anything to add.

Samir It's a common challenge that we face with a lot of our clients. It's not for lack of great ideas out there, but finding that right balance. And it's really dependent on every company between consensus building and agreeing that everything everybody agrees that we have to do something about something and the disruption on the other end, that healthy disruption to say we need to change. We know we have a problem and let's get going, because incremental change is also good. It's also part of the journey. Not everything has to be transformational. I would say actually at the bottom line of it that any kind of change for it to be successful besides committed leadership is accepting a mindset of continuous change and a mindset of performance and how things link together, which really comes down to people. So really one of the biggest challenges that we face with our clients and yet one of the biggest enablers of any initiative.

Adam OK, Alaina, here's a chance to help out your fellow CFOs. A lot of them are sort of thinking about the business case. How do you get the rest of the C Suite on board with the need to transform the finance function?

Alaina It was really bringing the wider client's experience. And once I talked to our C Suite about the cool things we were doing for our clients and with our clients, you know what a great opportunity this was for us. We had a new leadership team at the time. They were looking for new insights, wanted different analysis. And so all of that kind of came together to enable us to say this is an opportunity. This is frankly, it's an opportunity. But really, it was a business imperative for us as we're growing, as we're if we're going to be providing our clients with the services we need to be eating our own dog food. So but it is a challenge because back office functions as as our clients will know, often don't get the don't get the budget. Now, a CFO, of course, there's always some input, you can tap into that. But it really is talking to your fellow executives, helping them understand the value that you're going to bring and getting them on board so that when it does become budget time, it's an easier sell.

Adam So this has been excellent. Thank you, Alaina, thank you, Samir, for your time. I am very excited to see what the future of finance holds for PwC and to continue to follow along this journey. Thanks for joining us today.

Alaina Thanks for having me.

Samir Great to be here.

Adam Thank you to all of our listeners for giving us your time today. We're going to continue the conversation in our next few episodes with even deeper dives on the key elements of transformation, as we like to call it, the three Ps: people process and performance. Visit our website at www.pwc.com/CA/FinanceIn15 to learn more about the opportunities ahead for finance leaders. That's www.pwc.com/CA/FinanceIn15. If you enjoyed today's episode, please let us know by leaving a review and rating us on Apple Podcasts. I'm Adam Boutros and this is the Finance in 15 podcast. This podcast has been produced by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and is for informational purposes only, contents discussed are for general guidance on matters of interest and should not be taken as professional, legal, business, or investment advice.