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Whether you bear comprehensive responsibility for the finance function or lead a part of the team focused on your own area of operational excellence, your role is fundamentally about balancing risk with opportunities to spur greater performance. The burden of managing financial risk, cash flow, strategic investment and compliance is a complex job, involving a broad spectrum of responsibilities.
How can you be confident that the risks of fraud, error and abuse are being well-managed without getting in the way of achieving your performance objectives? The typical approach is to rely on the types of internal controls that are built in to processes, and in particular, into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. But how dependable is this approach in practice?
Think about it: central to understanding where you stand is your reliance on what your ERP system is telling you. But it is difficult (dare I say impossible) to effectively control business processes and stop leakage from within such a complex platform.
How can you achieve an optimum balance between running a high-performance financial process and efficiently managing the gaps that exist in…
