Julie Schwendimann, vice president of global shared services at Stanley Black & Decker, quickly saw the benefits of the new operating model when the global pandemic hit and her team kept closing the books and paying the bills on time—while delivering timely insights to manage customer service. Schwendimann joined more than 150 business and industry experts at Accenture’s Future-Ready Forum and discussed what successful leaders are doing differently to thrive in this time of compressed transformation.

During this Forum fireside chat, Julie discussed how Stanley Black & Decker, a $14.5 billion global diversified industrial leader with 56,000 employees in more than 60 countries, approached moving to intelligent finance operations. In particular, she talked about what it takes to transform the core finance activities to optimize business performance and the strategic value delivered using data-driven insights.

Schwendimann’s view is confirmed by Accenture’s global research that reveals that organizations with highly mature operations are considered “future-ready” and are, on average, 1.7 times more efficient and 2.8 times more profitable. They also improve their talent mix, customer experiences and ecosystem relationships. Yet only 5% of finance leaders say they have future-ready operations while 35% want to be there in three years.

Schwendimann was facing quite a challenge. At Stanley Black & Decker, continuous innovation and a series of acquisitions had led to fragmented finance systems and processes across the globe. With operations in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas, decisions and data analytics were laborious and time-consuming. Manual processes, tasks, and gathering and reconciling data across systems left no time to analyze the insights and have thoughtful discussions with the business about budgets, plans and forecasts.

Schwendimann and her team began by reinventing business analysis and reporting. This included rethinking everything from data strategy, governance rules, the common finance language and key performance indicators. It meant that 70 plus disparate ERP systems needed to be connected to one centralized, simplified global environment, and standardizing finance data across all of business units and geographies to create a single version of financial truth.

For Schwendimann, putting data, digital technologies and the right infrastructure at the heart of finance operations made all the difference when COVID hit. It gave the team the agility and scale it needed to keep pace, continue to close the books in just four days, pay invoices and deliver timely reports—all while working from home. In addition, the team was able to gain richer data insights that allowed a better focus on the customer experience.

Schwendimann views ecosystem partners as essential for gaining fresh perspectives and brainstorming new solutions. And research supports this perspective—more than half of finance leaders said ecosystem relationships have improved over the last three years.

Even within a large global organization, teams can have similar mindsets. Tapping into third-party resources opens access to new ideas from outside experts and helps teams stay on top of trends. It can also free internal resources to focus on more value-added activities such as advanced financial modeling and predicting risks. Schwendimann leverages partnerships to ensure talent, bench strength and even stability in tiny markets.

While transformation can look different for each company, some challenges are universal. Schwendimann offers the following four tips:

1. Learn about digital capabilities. Be alert to trends and emerging areas such as cybersecurity and blockchain. Stay in the know because you can’t learn overnight.
2. Get to global faster. Being able to standardize and consolidate systems into one global ERP system sooner rather than later will pay for itself.
3. Look outside your four walls. Network and talk with industry peers to understand what others are doing to help shape your strategy and stay on the leading edge.
4. Keep an open mind. Be open and prepared to change.

To evaluate your own operations maturity, take Accenture’s Intelligent Operations Maturity assessment. Answering 10 questions provides you with a report you can use to better understand how to tackle compressed transformation challenges by building an intelligent operation.