Most CFOs deal with two major tasks on a regular basis - making essential financial decisions and financial reporting to a variety of stakeholders. There is a lot at stake, which includes the financial well-being of the company. Moreover, publicly traded companies publish this information in quarterly reports for investors. Hence, the accuracy of these quantifiable performance metrics is paramount for any organization while simplifying the clustered data collated from various coordinates of the company.

CFO dashboards is a robust solution to make financial data analysis an easy feat. It enhances the strategic and analytics effort impact on the financial aspect of any business.

What is a cockpit dashboard? How does it help?

Cockpit dashboards provide a quick and complete snapshot of an organization's status and overall direction, similar to a pilot's dashboard. These dashboards not only display information fast, but they can also flash a warning when a problem is imminent or when certain variables exceed predetermined limitations. The dashboard also facilitates easy navigation to various areas of the dashboards for deeper study.

CFO dashboards serve as a central, interactive center for a plethora of critical fiscal information, including dynamic financial KPIs and intuitive analytical tools. They also consolidate data in a way that is comprehensible and aids decision-making.

With evolving business dynamics, the top priorities of a CFO have also evolved in several ways including:

1. Strategic innovation and decision making
   By obtaining a comprehensive view of all your company's critical financial activities and interacting with visualizations of a variety of dynamic data, you can make informed real-time decisions with total confidence. Saving time and boosting personal efficiency will allow you more room to explore unique ideas and strategies to increase your company's financial performance.
    
2. Sustainable growth and profitability
   Working with a broad array of benchmarkable insights gathered through expert data analysis tools, you will safeguard your company's financial health, and reduce excessive expenditures while uncovering ways to increase revenue and attract valued investors.
    
3. Operational efficiency
   Parameters such as mapping out a company's performance, historical benchmarks, and so on can be challenging, and yet enable the CFO and the board to reduce inefficiencies. The sheer scope of visual data served up by a CFO dashboard tool gives you an accurate eye on every core financial process across the business.
    
4. Efficient reporting and risk management
   Mitigating financial risk is a top priority for a CFO. CFO dashboards provide you with examples and reports built up from a cohesive mix of past, predictive, and real-time data to help you easily identify any potential issues or inefficiencies. Moreover, it also empowers you to take preventive actions before impacting the financial health of the company.
    
5. Cohesion, collaboration, and communication
   Accessible, customizable, and interactive display of essential financial metrics can empower the decision makers to strategize and monitor metrics wherever they are in the world. In addition, this universal access propagates enhanced collaboration while boosting productivity across the board.

With the capability a CFO brings on the table, the above-mentioned priorities get coupled with challenges which are being faced globally by almost every CFO. These challenges come up with the continuously changing environment.

Today's CFOs are in charge of much more than finance alone. On an average, five functions other than finance currently report to the CFO. According to McKinsey, more than half of the CFOs believe risk, regulatory compliance, and M&A transactions and execution report directly to them, while 38% oversee IT. Some CFOs even manage cybersecurity and digitization, suggesting just how diversified the list of demands on the CFO is. Hence, the evolving need of the role evokes new challenges.

• Big data with clustered sets
  The generation of data and its collection from various subsidiaries of an organization has been rising exponentially, requiring more efforts to assimilate the clusters of data to derive actionable insights. A major challenge is the connection to these multiple data sources.
   
• Availability of cutting-edge technologies
  The onset of wide implementation capability of technologies with cutting age features like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation bring in new challenges. CFOs are under pressure to make the right decisions given the complexity involved in making the right choices and implementing these technologies.
   
• Change and risk management
  The CFO is expected to possess deep understanding of every aspect of the business operations. This puts pressure on the CFO's office to manage scarce resources to ensure effective returns to all the stakeholders involved.

Studies across the world indicate that CFOs will face a new set of challenges due to fast changing economic environments. Events in the recent past such as the pandemic, trade wars, etc. justify the uncertainty of the current environment. These uncertainties also provide opportunities for organizations to grow with.

How Wipro helps customers increase productivity with CFO dashboard

Wipro provides end-to-end support for customers' analytics strategy in the following ways:

• Wipro helps to mitigate the operational and data privacy risks
• Customers can select solutions that are compatible with their existing application environment
• Wipro will leverage its existing skilled resources to make necessary amendments to customize solutions
• Wipro can build customized reusable dashboards KPIs, specific to the business requirements. Also, for better integration of clustered data sets across platforms on the customer’s ecosystem.

Our unique combination of processes and platforms amplifies and accelerates value. Figure 1 provides an understanding of how the value chain will deliver for you.

Figure 1: Data and insights value chain

Wipro’s implementation strategy for CFO dashboard

CFO cockpit dashboards take an all-inclusive approach to cater to your needs. Wipro’s analytics team meets the operational requirements of continuous operations by providing managed services. We incorporate managed services coupled with the best talent and best-in class tested processes to offer you cutting-edge technology.

Wipro provides day-to-day operations support to the team on a managed service approach, 365 days a year, including project governance, management, and stakeholder engagement. We assist customers in developing an end-to-end reporting process and implementing their analytics strategy.

Key benefits include:

1. Easily available talent pool that can be deployed at strategic locations
2. A team capable of aggregating clustered data sets from variety of application systems, cleansing it, validating, and harmonizing it
3. Automated solutions to eliminate manual intervention and allow integration of real time data updates from multiple business units
4. Value oriented delivery process (indicated in Figure 1) ensuring predictive and prescriptive analysis for you to maneuver the uncharted situations to assist in change and risk management
5. Wipro's analytics academy for ready to use knowledge, skills, and tools, thereby reducing time to market

When it comes to your company's finances, you cannot compromise. Working with the most cutting-edge technologies for the job allows you to save expenses, increase revenues, and streamline your company's operations in ways you never imagined possible.

It is evident that embracing the all-encompassing power and unequalled analytical capacities of CFO-based data dashboards is no longer a choice if you want to simplify your performance while accelerating the growth of your firm.

As CFOs understand the role advanced analytics can play in enhancing financial processes, they can collaborate with the board of directors and other senior leaders to discover broader applications of advanced analytics to uncover new sources of value for the company.

About the Author(s)

Santhosh Francis
Practice Manager - Data and Insights Practice, Wipro

Santhosh heads Wipro's Data and Insights practice, which develops BI analytics solutions leveraging comprehensive machine learning and decision intelligence for solving business challenges of clients. He has over 21 years of experience in the field of data analytics and is also a Doctoral Researcher at SSBM, Geneva - specializing in the field of data science.

Shubham Kumar
Presales Consultant - Data and Insights Practice, Wipro

Shubham is a presales consultant with Wipro’s Data and Insights practice, where he supports in building data and analytics solutions, and GTM plans addressing business problems for global clients. He brings the sales, distribution and marketing expertise and holds an MBA degree specialized in Sales and Marketing from SCMHRD, Pune.