Better Bottom Line Decisions

Right now who doesn't want to improve their bottom line? To help with this CFO Magazine and SAP are sponsoring a webcast on Improving Cost and Profitability Decisions in a Challenging Economic Environment. There are many well-defined methodologies, techniques and tools to measure both costs and profitability, and everyone should be aware of these (and ideally applying them to their businesses).

However one of the most critical issues that is often overlooked is the need to have access to the right data, to understand the real cost of a decision and whether it's a profitable one (or not). In many companies, this is viewed as an IT problem, but it's typically the Finance Department that owns the critical information which allows the true measurement of both cost and profitability. In many companies that data is trapped in proprietary financial systems that aren't well integrated with the organization's operational data. Yet access to that financial information in real-time (or near real-time) and the ability to instantly analyze any operational decision using that financial information can make the difference between a profitable decision and one which gets you in to trouble - sometime in the future.

True finance innovators know this, and the smart ones are investing in the technologies that allow them this kind of instantaneous access and seamless integration of their finance systems with their operational ones, to help them make better bottom line decisions.

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