CFO Thought Leader Webinar Features The Keystone Group’s Insights
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) October 30, 2015 -- The Keystone Group, an award-winning boutique consultancy with a focus on creating value for clients across multiple industries in a collaborative framework, has delivered again with Director Bill Budicin’s keen insights, available through a lively CFO Thought Leader hosted webinar.
Moderated by CFO Thought Leader’s founder, Jack Sweeney, the October 14 session, called “The Operations Mandate: A CFO Guide to Achieving an Integrated View of Finance and Operations,” featured Budicin along with key representatives of Intralinks and BlackLine. The live event was well attended by thought leaders from some of the country's leading corporations, universities, NGOs and healthcare organizations, among others.
Budicin’s remarks emphasized the CFO role’s transformative shift away from financial packets and last year’s budgets, toward a more inclusive and responsive view of measuring success with meaningful operating metrics across the enterprise that drive profitability. His deep insights are drawn from experience with Keystone Group clients, including a case study of an industrial products firm seeking to identify its competitive edge – and uncovering specific steps, at all levels of the business, where that advantage can be leveraged.
The transformation begins with direct questions about how companies measure their success, Budicin said. “Do you think your customers care about sales per employee? Do you think that sales per employee gives you a competitive advantage?” he asks, as he introduces an exploration of what success really looks like and how department heads and decision makers must understand what give their company a competitive advantage.
The competitive advantage is based on a customer’s perspective, Budicin explained. “Once you understand the customer base better, then you’re going to understand what operations, or engineering or HR, or the other functional areas need to do to win over customers. And you’ll be able to help develop critical success factors that ultimately drive profits.” In the Keystone case study Budicin discussed how management believed ease of doing business was the competitive advantage – but no one could define it or measure it. The CFO was able to work with the rest of the functional VP’s to define it, measure it and improve profitability.
Examples included improvements to the online experience driven by the IT department, decreased lead times delivered through an engineering staff focused on improved manufacturing design, and packaging improvements that solved customer storage problems. Most of all, Budicin said, the consultancy role was critical to the company's success in guiding them to a better use of actionable data and information.
“Working with IT on how we avoid being data-rich and information poor,” Budicin said, is a CFO strategy that pays off in profitability – and gets CFOs out of the office and collaboratively engaged at all levels.
To hear Budicin and the complete CFO Thought Leader webinar, see the event linked at this website.
About The Keystone Group
The Keystone Group is a results-oriented management consulting firm that works with mid-market manufacturing and distribution clients to develop and execute strategy, improve operations, restructure finances, and integrate acquisitions. Founded in 1991, The Keystone Group was created to bring A-list talent to management consulting, and to make a substantive difference in the companies they work with. For more information, visit The Keystone Group online at http://www.thekeystonegroup.com.
David Schutzman, The Keystone Group, http://www.gocloudlogistics.com/, +1 (203) 550-8551, [email protected]
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