8July 2018IN MYOPINIONImpact of Digitalization on Performance Management and Financial ReportingBy Anton Duvall, CFO, Siemens Building Technologies' Operations across the AmericasDigitalization is not new; the discourse concerning its benefits to business organizations, specifically from a performance perspective has been going on for years. It is believed that digital technology will reduce the amount of labor and bring better efficiency and productivity. For instance, with digital technology on the forefront of data management, the valuable skilled labor for data analysis can be purely focused on true analysis. Our encounter with digital technologies started off with an interesting instance. In the headquarters, I was in a situation where four people from different departments left around at the same time, opening vacancies for four important positions. Instead of filling these positions, I took the opportunity to tell the team that we are going to leave those positions unfilled and are going to re-organize the headquarters by adopting a drive towards digitalization in everything we do, thus, started our journey towards digitalizing performance management, financial reporting, management of financial risks, financial risks and more. Challenges Encountering the Digitalization of Performance ManagementIn correspondence to the situation under which digitalization was adopted, one of the biggest challenges was to immediately adapt to a perfectly enabled system to fill the vacant positions. With lesser labor resources and increasing work, it became a herculean task to make a swift transition to digital technology. Another impending challenge with the immediate adoption of technology was that I just could not expect my workforce to naturally follow the new processes; it became incumbent on me, as the one initiating the transition to help my workforce understand the technology and train them to perform their new roles. Adopting the Right Technological Solution for Work ProcessAs we don't have a digitalization or data experts departments in our division, we are focused on developing the most efficient way to provide SAP system. In addition, we found out that there was one department namely procurement which was particularly ahead at reporting, performance management, and performance measurement. This specific procurement department has been powering reporting for a number of other divisions in the U.S. by availing the services of a tool called QlikView, business intelligence software that helps in the building of interactive, guided analytics application and dashboards. Inspired by these positive results which the procurement department found with QlikView, we realized that there is no point going through the whole process of experimenting with other technological solutions and decided to integrate the above solution by recruiting a bunch of contingent workers who were particularly good around QlikView or QlikSense. Once we incorporated QlikView at the headquarters, my objective was to get the tool adopted by all the departments in the division. I wanted to channel all forms of data to similar systems and similar dashboards so that we could develop a consistent view and approach, and through this eventually, have all kinds of reporting done in a single business dashboard rather than having narrowly designed department based dashboards.Anton Duvall
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