Account-to-Report Maturity Assessment

Account-to-Report Maturity Assessment - A process oriented approach for evaluating the performance of your Finance & Accounting operations

- Ikemefuna Allen

Maturity assessment offers a pragmatic approach to evaluate the performance of an organization because it – unlike performance indicators alone – gives an insight to areas of improvement and helps setting realistic goals by decomposing the maturity into different dimensions and applying a ‘stages of excellence’ approach helping companies to orient and benchmark it’s performance.

Account-to-Report maturity is assessed considering different dimensions of the organization and provides a well-rounded view on whether Finance & Accounting departments “are doing things right” or whether specific areas may need improvement.

The six maturity dimensions are:

1. Process Efficiency

2. Systems standardization and integration

3. Strategic Objectives and KPIs

4. Data quality and availability

5. Process performance and compliance transparency

6. Staff empowerment

Along these six dimensions, data is collected in a maturity survey structured along 10 Account-to-Report processes areas of our Business Flows reference model. The survey results provide a diagnosis of the “as is” situation and more importantly insights on what dimension(s) should be focused on to achieve the desired level of maturity. This is where we apply a “Stages of Excellence” approach which serve to orientate companies by providing a benchmark for performance.

“Stages of Excellence” summarize the main characteristics a company must have at respective maturity levels as a benchmark which allows the organization to compare “where it is now” and “where it wants to be in future” in terms of its performance.

At the highest maturity level, the organization takes a proactive attitude about challenging circumstances impacting the financial health of the company, and has the capabilities to anticipate significant events impacting tax and accounting practices, as well as compliance. Account-to-Report mastery also implies that the finance department is advanced in the way it operates and can focus attention on achieving efficiencies and perfecting financial management processes while minimizing increases in costs and risks.

For further details on the approach, please refer to the full article.

The assessment is captured into a comprehensive report enabling prioritizing measures and initiatives for reaching the next maturity level.

For whom is the maturity assessment useful? When can it be applied?

Our maturity assessment offers a pragmatic approach to evaluate the performance of an organization because it gives an insight to areas of improvement and helps setting realistic goals. It can be used by CFOs to assess and benchmark Finance operations across the enterprise. Moreover, our maturity assessment is useful for Finance Department Heads as it offers insights on specific areas of operations for improvement. Business Transformation Managers and Process Managers also benefit from a maturity assessment as it provides them a toolkit that can be applied prior to, during, and after the business transformation initiative.

For inquiries on the Account-to-Report maturity survey and how to conduct an assessment for your organization please feel free to contact me.

Best regards

Ikemefuna Allen

Welcome to our Care Club! – We care, we act, we deliver.

- Matej Buzinkai & Merle Steinkamp

Health initiative supported via insa Gesundheitsmanagement GmbH and mobil Betriebskrankenkasse

With our Care Club at bpExperts we want to highlight on one of our three core promises:

“We care, we act, we deliver!”

View fullsize

We care. We care about us, our colleagues, our team and of course our customers. With the Care Club initiative, we aim as a team to focus on promoting health and ensure health long term.

With the Care Club we want to create and provide a range of tools and support mechanisms to  promote and ensure health, well-being, and motivation of each individual so that we can continue to perform healthy and wholehearted in the demanding field in which we want to work.  

We are working on this with our strong partner, insa Gesundheitsmanagement GmbH with their 15 years of experience as a service provider in occupational health management they accompany our endeavor by providing us with tools and knowledge to continue to work on a culture that jointly drives change, shapes our organization together and where we show consideration for each other. Furthermore, mobil Betriebskrankenkasse is sponsoring our initiative.  Care Club was founded as a reflection of our company values. Simultaneously, it helps to strengthen them even more and supports awareness of them.

bpExperts Company Values

Care Club is still new and would need the support of each member of the team so that together, we keep bpExperts a pleasant and vibrant place to work. The most important way how each of us can be a contributing member of the Care Club is to be open to both ask for help and provide help to others, whether it is a simple task or a difficult life situation. 

At the same time, we want to provide the tools and advice to improve our own resilience and improve the way we handle stress, in order to have more energy to enjoy both our work and off-work activities. In Care Club, we create our own health toolbox, which means that everyone is encouraged to ask for an activity or a training that they think would benefit their own health and the health of their colleagues and friends.  

Care Club – only for members! – This means that everyone is automatically part of our club, if they  are employed by bpExperts. The activities are freely available to all of us, always on a voluntary basis. 

Many thanks to our supporters, sponsor and employees. 

Business Transformation Governance - or how to keep your governance alive throughout the transformation lifecycle

- Ikemefuna Allen

Business Transformation aims at making fundamental changes in the way an organization operates. One can imagine that initiating the change and the resulting impact on people comes with many challenges. Because Business Transformation is always in a state of evolution, it is very challenging to maintain the procedures and guardrails for managing transformation programs as they expand in complexity over different phases. Therefore, such programs often experience one or more of the following symptoms as they evolve and their magnitude increases:

It goes without saying that the above-mentioned symptoms can have dire consequences on the wellbeing and future of the transformation undertaking. Our experience points to the fact that these issues will not occur when good governance is established and maintained throughout the lifetime of transformation. Good governance helps avoid Business Transformations failing by means of establishing:

• A single source of truth for requirement

• Change Management for constantly evolving requirements

• A link between requirements and test

• Traceability of requirements through the development life cycle

• Clear definition of roles and communication between stakeholders

• Cross-functional ownership

• Performance indicators to measure success of the transformation program

Understanding holistic transformation governance

Let me use the analogy of the big bang and expanding universe to explain our philosophy on holistic transformation governance. In this light, governance establishes the natural laws for effectively managing transformations as they expand over their lifetime. These natural laws consist of the transformation initiative’s meta model or grand design of the relationships between the ‘matter’ and substances, i.e. how stakeholders and project team, and design and implementation interact during the transformation. Holistic governance establishes the rules on how ‘matter’ should interact over time and space, and thus, in context of a complex initiative, how the grand design should be implemented.

For governance to work over time, one must go beyond its initial setup and put in place a framework that allows governance to adapt as the scope changes. This approach ensures that governance remains intact as transformations expand in scope and over time. What follows are the steps we advise should be taken to ensure that governance stays alive as the transformation program evolves:

• Define the product governance as part of the transformation product backlog. This includes

  • the meta model (content to be governed, i.e. business processes, systems, data but also all related documentation and communication results),

  • governance processes (i.e. decisions taking, approval and change request processes),

  • governance roles (i.e. business process owner and product owner) and

  • tools (modelling, DMS, test management, task tracking, etc).

• Incorporate governance-related user stories into sprint planning to address all governance related requirements

• Run sprints and deliver governance related sprint backlog requirements. Here each phase of the transformation program can be broken down into two to four week sprints.

• Sprint review enables assessing the applicability of the governance concept to the evolving transformation program. At this point, it is important to consider whether there are dedicated changes of phases that require an adjustment of the governance (e.g. going from build to deploy would require considering new roles such as trainers and end users).

• Release & deliver governance content to users

• Refine backlog items including user stories pertaining the governance (where needed)

Call for action

Good governance helps avoid Business Transformations failing by means of maintaining the procedures and guardrails that manage programs as they expand in complexity over different phases. In order for governance to work over time, businesses must go beyond implementing governance just once by defining – at an early stage –a program management manual. It is necessary to put in place a framework that facilitates “governance to evolve”, thus remaining intact as transformations expand in scope and execution complexity as they evolve from design to delivery.

At bpExperts we have developed a framework which helps companies expedite the setup of their holistic transformation governance. It consists of a reference architecture for the meta model, reference content for industrial enterprises, governance roles and processes.

 For inquiries on transformation governance and how we can support your organization please feel free to contact me.

Best regards

Ikemefuna Allen

Merry Christmas and a good start to the NEW YEAR 2021

2020 is a year that we will all remember for a long time. Familiar habits and human closeness were suddenly no longer a matter of course. Everyone has experienced some kind of restriction. And everyone is looking to the future with a certain degree of uncertainty. The year has taken many of us, personally and professionally, to our limits. We know that the past year was a challenging one for us all. Even more, we would like to thank you for the good cooperation. We have great respect for what you have achieved in this special situation. 

Christmas parties also look different this year. We would like to share with you how we celebrated Xmas at bpExperts under these special circumstances.  Like many others, we opted for a virtual party to give this year a nice ending.   

View fullsize

Love always, Secret Santa!

To spread a little Christmas joy Russell had the great idea of having a Secret Santa. We would like to express a special thank you to our colleague Christina who coordinated everything and randomly assigned every team member a Secret Santa. At the virtual party, the challenge was to guess who sent which gift. Like the motto: "How well do you know your colleagues?" The best guesses were made.

Everyone received a small personal gift. After the Secret Santa and get-together, everyone had the opportunity to split up into breakout rooms, play games together and compete against each other. It was a very delightful and funny Christmas party and a successful end of the year with my colleagues. Have fun looking at the photos.

View fullsize

I sincerely hope that next year everything will get back into a good flow and we will again find time to meet in person. Let us hope for the best... Let us tackle it together again after the holidays.  

The bpExperts team wishes you and your family a peaceful and merry Christmas and a good start to the New Year 2021.  

With best thanks and kindest regards 

Gülsüm  

Business Readiness and Change Management

How Business Readiness and Change Management guide the transformation of systems, processes, and people.

View fullsize

Fig. 1 Transformation of systems, processes and people

On November 26th 2020, bpExperts hosted a virtual Release Party presenting our new product, “Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP”.

The meeting was organized in two breakout sessions. The first breakout session covered the SAP Activate Phases ‘Discover’ and ‘Prepare’ and focused on the top-down E2E design as well as the bottom-up analysis of existing SAP Landscape (technical redocumentation). The second breakout session covered the phases ‘Explore’, ‘Realize’ and ‘Deploy’ and focused on “Business Readiness and Change Management”: how Business Readiness and Change Management guide the Transformation of Systems, Processes, and People. We discussed with the participants in this session how this transformation journey can be aided by individual packages in business flows, packages which build on each other in many phases of this methodology.

One question raised by our guests was related to Business Roles: “How can Business Roles and related authorizations be defined in order to meet this variety of local requirements?”

Business Roles are a key link of the process and solution design with Change Management activities. Business Roles differ from user roles and job descriptions, as they are based on the nature of the performed activities and do not refer to any department structure or HR relevant specifications of jobs. Many companies are operating in various countries and with entities of different sizes. So it is important finding the right balance in the number of business roles.

In Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP we now provide a Business Roles Library you can use as a reference. The included roles are a ‘best-of’ compilation suiting the purpose and scope of a typical SAP-related Business Transformation.

Business Roles and their related Business Processes form the basis and common terminology for change impact, training, authorization, segregation of duty (SoD) throughout the whole transformation lifecycle.

Change Impact Analysis reveals the requirements when deploying to local sites. Taking into consideration the operating models, scope of deployed processes as well as the local site structures the required Business Roles are mapped against the local situation (resources and skills) to generate the future operating model. The results need to be further processed (e.g. business readiness and training plans, authorizations) and identified issues (such as Segregation of Duty, lack of skills, re-organisational requirements) need to be addressed.

Another question raised was: “How to successfully prepare End-User training?”

One participant asked us how to avoid surprises in End User training on missing functionality, non-matching processes and poor acceptance of the solution.
We understand and emphasize that communication and expectation management need to be an integral part of any transformation initiative (all scales of projects: from process change, via tool change to large Business Transformation projects). Fundamentally we believe that the process-driven approach as represented in Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP with early and active involvement of Process Experts and/or End Users is the key to success because it helps to set the context of requirements and expectations to the overarching strategy, transformation objectives and design principles. Early involvement helps buy-in and creating a sense of ownership.

Fig. 2 Individual work packages building on each other in Explore, Realize and Deploy Phases

The common success factor to all the above mentioned is to start with Business Readiness and Change Management activities very early. During project initiation and planning phases latest in early design stages. Identification of stakeholders, Process Owners and Process Experts not just with decision power, but also with good contacts and influence within the community of affected employees is vital. The involvement of selected key players, both supportive and critical thinking is the next step. Only then, all transformation activities can be supported and lead towards successful change.

In case you want to know more about our methodology, specifically how we have woven in the aspects of Business Readiness and Change Management, please reach out to us.

Best regards

Your bpExperts Team