Next-Gen Financials, the Critical Influencers of New-Age Businesses

In today's technology-driven landscape of intelligent, cognitive, and adaptive systems, every enterprise's expectations from a smart F&A solution have undergone tremendous transformation. The current crop of F&A solutions are expected to deliver critical support to CFOs in effortlessly manage their responsibilities and sail through their challenges of a perennially changing market landscape, tight regulatory restrictions, extensive globalization, and high scope for risk in operating within the highly flexible and dynamic business ecosystem.

Enterprises are clearly on the lookout for solutions that are capable of providing next-gen financials that can help them stay ahead of competition even when the ecosystem is perennially transformative.

But what are the characteristics of these next-gen financials? How will they catalyze businesses? Where does Ramco stand in this race for delivering intelligent and futuristic F&A solutions? Let's find out.

Essential characteristics of ideal next-gen financials

Next-gen financials clearly need to satisfy four critical determiners that every enterprise looks for:

• Seamless integration with every business functionality
• Intelligent automation that delivers smart data-driven insights
• Effortless task-level management of F&A responsibilities
• Scalability to accommodate ever-transforming technology

Seamless Integration with every business functionality

F&A is an essential element across all enterprise operations; however, most of the current solutions offer F&A as just support elements without the much-needed integration across functionalities. Next-gen financials deliver effectively on this expectation, effortlessly automating and connecting every F&A-related operational activity across the organization, such as inventory management, auto-generation of quotes based on selection of the ideal vendor, smart and unique contract model definitions, real-time tracking of costs and expenses, and regulatory and budget controls. This business-centric feature has immense benefits in enabling operational effectiveness from an F&A perspective.

Ramco's F&A solution delivers the taste of next-gen financials in enabling airtight integration across all functionalities. For example, in MRO, the solution delivers automatic vendor selection for timely part delivery based on geography, performance, availability, cost and other factors the moment the part inventory level goes below a predefined threshold value. In logistics, F&A functionalities are tightly integrated with every operational unit across the quote to invoice cycle. As a result, the moment the customer uses sign-on-glass accepting the consignment, the invoicing process is initiated, capturing every cost accurately.

Intelligent automation across functionalities

Smart automations that organize user responsibilities are the key empowering elements of every next-gen financial solution. Right from easy implementation across the enterprise to error-free data management and zero version issues, these F&A solutions deliver secure, customizable, and feature-packed solutions to every enterprise stakeholder.

Let's take Ramco's F&A solution as an example. Their integral Mail it! feature helps users manage simple and routine transactions such as approvals and reviews with just a simple email even when on the go, without having to spend time logging into the system. Their Prompt it! feature provides extensive cognitive support in smart decision-making, providing detailed data-driven insights based on an algorithm-based review of all available data and patterns. The ever-popular chatbots also provide critical support in automating routine activities and responding to regular queries across a convenient conversational interface.

Task-level management of functions

In today's business landscape, every enterprise operation occurs at the task level, with critical transactional responsibilities linked to F&A functions. Hence detecting the health of every single process across all the operational nodes is critical not just for efficient process management, but also to enable a healthy enterprise from an F&A point of view.

Ramco's augmented analytics serves as the enterprise version of an effective Enterprise Cardio Gram (ECG) that can instantly detect any delays or inefficiencies across every F&A process at the task level. The in-depth insights reveal additional task-level information about, say, an invoicing process, including source of delay, possible solutions to overcome the block, and real-time alerts for prompt action. This approach provides critical support to stakeholders in smart decision-making.

Effortless adoption of continuous innovation

The ever-transforming technological innovations have delivered brilliant solutions that have accelerated the business landscape's digital transformation. With most enterprise innovations including a critical F&A element, a smooth adoption of these innovations by every user is an important deal-breaker for accurate F&A functioning. Hence, one of the core focus areas of introducing innovative technology, especially from a next-gen financials point of view, should be on simplifying user experience.

Ramco's F&A solutions deliver entirely on enabling a user-friendly experience across all their innovations. Their Hub it! tool delivers a super-interactive, mobility-driven, intelligent, and intuitive one-stop dashboard that includes features such as deep-dive into details, cognitive suggestions based on previous transactions, and alerts, flags, and prompts.

Pivot IT is another effective tool from Ramco, which delivers comprehensive data analytics using dimensions. This MIS tool allows users to personalize business information to the company’s business needs, minimizing the need for manually building and maintaining customized reports. It also automatically publishes powerful, requirement-based, de-normalized views from pre-processed data tables, with pre-built analytics and dimensions for different functional areas.

Ushering in the new era of next-gen financials with intelligent F&A solutions

Minimized human intervention, effortless automation, smooth integration and scalability, smart digital assistants, and exemplary user experience are some of the critical requirements of next-gen financials. These characteristics empower F&A solutions to deliver a self-running F&A system across the enterprise. In today's era of exponential digital transformation, the only wrong move enterprises make is to stay stagnant. The dangers of this stagnancy are especially relevant in the F&A scenario. With next-gen financials rising up strongly to deliver intelligent F&A solutions, it's now your turn to adopt these smart transformations for your enterprise.

Read more on Ramco's Self-Running Finance here - https://bit.ly/2LLGlny