Re-skilling of The Finance Function Is The Need Of The Hour: Experts
Many companies were struggling to generate their revenue and managing funds properly in uncertain times. To discuss the challenges that financial leaders faced, Panel had stalwarts from the Finance domain-Mankiran Chowhan, MD - India , SAP Concur; Chirag Mehta , CFO and Head Legal & IT CFO, Bharat Serums & Vaccines Ltd; Sameer Godbole , CFO , L&T Valves Limited; Snehal Shah, CFO, Birla Century; Sanjay Agarwal, CFO, Jyothy Lab; Sujoy Dasgupta, CFO, Bharat Fritz Werner Ltd; Manoj Bhat , CFO, Tech Mahindra and Hoshie Ghaswalla, CEO, BW Businessworld (Moderator)
Explaining the fundamental changes in the last few months, Sameer Godbole said, “I would start first with the workplace Dynamics itself, and we have all been talking about work from home. But in my view work from home is opening up a lot of possibilities not just in terms of cost but also in terms of employee productivity, technology, data, and security so on and so forth. So I think that work from home and the ecosystem around it is one basic fundamental change.”
“The second important and the more subtle changes happening gradually is the relationship between an employer and an employee, you know, in terms of the expectations of the employees from the organization.” He added
Decoding the last 9 months, Manohar Bhat affirmed, we literally had to make sure that about our staff working from home in a manner where we were taking care of their client's data very secure and so on and so forth and then, more importantly, how do we think about outcomes productivity in such an environment. I think that's the other thing which changes which kind of links back to how you create an environment where things like Innovation things like productivity can be maintained at the same level and I think this is evolving.
“We think about more and more especially in the services industry more and more Trend towards remote working, work from home and from anywhere. I think we are going to see more of more innovation in that space in terms of how do we manage teams, How do we drive outcomes and Innovation.” He added.
Stressing on the strategy, Snehal Shah mentioned, “You can't keep on going and changing your strategy at that time Spectra is what my belief is because the crisis is going to tide over and once the crisis is over you can start re-strategizing yourself because when you started eyes all the things that we are talking about if they are not part of the strategy”
“When we started, we have our plans. We didn't really see a big change that we had to undergo. Yes. We certainly had a more tactical focus now on cash conservation and on working capital. I feel that if you had a good strategy in place. Any business, they really don't have to really rethink about everything just because this crisis hit them.” He added.
Explaining capital management, Chirag Mehta said, “We really hadn't slowed down on our cash and on our investments and I think we have a distinct advantage of being in the pharmacies so we could have. Our projects continued but at a Slower Pace. We have also initiated the new apex that we had planned a couple of months ago, we have started initiating. Also, we have the opportunity to reduce our cost of capital which we went in. “
“I think in this time we have identified some fixed cost load that we had initially that we could cut and move that into a better. Moreover, companies will start looking at Manpower definitely. People working from home are actually saving office costs and reducing the rent cost as well.” He added.
Talking about the trends, Mahkiran Chowhan said, “we're seeing around transmission with the finance function are- Re-skilling of the finance function, Redesigning the Finance function by creating a balance between the centralized and decentralized services, Adoption of intelligent Technologies and lastly, Finance transformation where we talk about decision-ready data.”
“It is true that crisis is suddenly created some unimagined challenges and uncertainty but is also prevent being presented as an opportunity to read, pause, reassess and develop the strategies to help organizations, not only survive but also focus on becoming more resilient towards future and uncertain conditions.” She added.
Talking about the importance of communication, Sujoy Dasgupta affirmed, “Initially, there was a lot of confusion in March and April and due to lockdown nobody was allowed to move. Slowly, things started opening up and we started receiving a lot of Grievances and questions from the employees and the suppliers. Some of our customers’ orders were supposed to be executed in the third week and they wanted to know about what's going on. So the sales team reached out to the customers and the supply chain. We stopped the vendors and some of us reached out of the leadership teams.”
“I think the leadership role in communicating with employees and with the various stakeholders was very crucial. That's one big thing that happened because there was nothing else to do except to communicate energy. So the leadership communication helped us to drive forward.” He added.
