Building the High Performance Finance Function

As the world is entering possibly the deepest recession since the 1980s, many organizations realize they should have prepared better for tough times. Thus, there is increased interest in the concept of the high-performance organization (HPO). The HPO is defined as "an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of five years or more, by focusing in a disciplined way on that what really matters to the organization." Core to the HPO idea is to create such a strong internal organization that it can easily and flexibly deal with both threats and opportunities presented by the outside world. This can only be effectively achieved when all parts of the organization contribute to creating and sustaining the HPO. This means that all departments, functions, business units, and divisions must transform themselves into high-performance entities. Among the most important support functions of every organization is the finance function. The term "finance function" refers to all financial processes in an organization. The professionals responsible for financial processes usually work in the finance department but can also operate in other parts of the organization, for instance as business unit controllers. The finance function can be regarded as the spider in the organizational web, as it has relations with every part of the organization and is also represented on the executive board. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that this function takes the lead by quickly transforming itself into a high-performance finance function (HPFF), serving as a role model for other functions in the organization. An HPFF is defined as "a function that supports the organization to become and remain an HPO by ensuring that its people, processes, and systems are of the highest quality." The key question however is how an HPFF can be created. This book not only describes the development of the HPFF framework (which is based on a large literature review of current trends in finance functions and a survey among financial professionals) but also explores the experiences, lessons learned and results achieved by finance functions that have transformed themselves into "HPFFs" or high performance finance functions using the HPFF framework. The book's experiences will be abundantly illustrated by real-life case studies from finance functions from multinational and other profit companies, and governmental organizations. With this book finance professionals have a roadmap to convince the organization of the importance of becoming an HPFF. The main audience for this book is the financial professional who wants to think about and build - together with fellow financial professionals - a high performance financial function. So a financial professional who dares to dream of a better financial function, and who wants to contribute to the further development of that function. A financial person who feels that ""control"" and ""compliance"" alone are not sufficient to excel – that more must be done for that.