Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs), share some common business concerns, such as cost control, risk management, technological advancements and talent development to name several. Working together, experienced CFOs are able to elevate the function of a CPO, helping them to make more strategic business decisions.
One of the key roles of a CFO is to ensure that a business is making strategic decisions based upon solid financial insight. One of the roles that a CPO is often tasked with is to help the business make good decisions about how it spends its money externally, decisions that are often financially based.
Here are some important ways that CFOs and Procurement teams can work together to support a business as true partners:
Drive Productivity: Deliver bottom-line savings (i.e., improve profit margins) traceable to the Profit and Loss statement (P&L), essentially removing costs from ongoing operations and reinvesting them to fuel growth of new products.
Improve working capital: This can be very useful for cash flow management, especially Accounts Payable management but also Inventory.
Ensure process standardization & compliance: Even if not a glamorous part of their role, CFOs can help guide purchasing activities and confirm that policies and procedures are being adhered to.
Ensure reporting integrity: Savings and initiatives should be traced back to the P&L of the impacted business unit. No market ups & downs should be reported - only true savings that improve the baseline year on year.
Bring the outside in: CFOs can act as the company's outreach in the marketplace and support the Procurement teams in searching out, discovering and internalizing new sources of supply, new innovations, and new sources of extracted value.
Exchange knowledge and talent: CFOs are able to train the Procurement teams in areas of financial analysis so that they can evaluate longer term options in improving their Supply Chain Management instead of a simplistic short-term perspective.
If you are a business owner or CEO within the San Francisco Bay Area or Silicon Valley, in need of an experienced part-time CFO to help your company improve cash flow, accounting and billing process management, as well as profit margins, our highly skilled outsourced CFO services provide direct access to high-quality expertise in a cost-effective manner.
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