APQC recently conducted a survey of financial management professionals’ improvement goals and priorities. The results reveal vexing challenges in financial process standardization, labor cost reduction, and better decision support. These issues intersect—and not in a good way for many finance teams. In short, unless you have process standardization and strict process governance, you’ll never find labor-cost reduction opportunities. You’ll never get out of the mud—and you’ll never be able to convince key internal leaders that investing in finance talent development will yield good returns for the business.

A recent APQC survey showed that only 54 percent of finance managers believe their current finance talent pool has enough skills and knowledge to contribute in a meaningful way to the pursuit of overall business goals. But relatively few CFOs are investing resources in finance talent development. The amount of resources dedicated to people development– relative to the budget for overall finance function operations – is miniscule. This conflict has led to a “know-how” deficit, particularly in the realm of predictive analytics. I think this is loud wakeup call.

To learn more about this latest research from APQC, check out the white paper: What's Driving the Finance Agenda in 2017?