Post-COVID-19: The Road to Recovery with Accenture

As the world manages the ongoing effects of the global pandemic, your company is under significant pressure to steer a steady course and keep the business moving. Determining what’s next and how you will succeed over the long term can feel like an impossible task, especially in a world where suppliers have gone dark, transport lines are disrupted, and long-term customers may no longer be in business.

Your next steps will focus on building a strategy for long-term recovery. This plan will include identifying existing and emerging risks, understanding where the business remains stable, and opening new paths to revenue.

To do this, you must leverage a variety of finance and enterprise functions across your organization, such as working capital predictions; cost visibility; enterprise planning for finance, supply chain, procurement, and other parts of the business; as well as your financial closing processes and billing models.

All of these functions must be optimized to properly assess the state of your business. With access to accurate data and predictive analyses, you can avoid unnecessary risk while capitalizing on new revenue opportunities that change and instability bring.

Evaluating your current state

Your leadership team will have a good sense of the strengths and weaknesses that existed within the organization pre-pandemic. Now is the time to initiate open and honest discussions with your colleagues and peers to determine which functions are sub-optimal and in need of support.

For example, how well can you forecast cash flow for an accurate working capital forecast? And what about real-time reporting for analysis around your receivable collections?

If you have full confidence in your finance and enterprise functions, then your recovery strategy will likely be sound and instrumental in the survival of your company.

However, without all cylinders firing, the data you gather may be faulty and incomplete. As a result, the analyses you perform will be inaccurate, resulting in imprecise insights and predictions, that negatively impact the long-term performance of your business.

Restoring resiliency

At this moment, when you may not have the time, appetite or resources for large capital investments, focused point solutions can help you:

• Take a targeted approach to improve specific finance and enterprise functions without reinventing the entire wheel.
• Quickly replace key components so you can immediately upgrade your finance and analytics capabilities.

Resilient finance offerings from Accenture that leverage financial software from SAP, are built specifically for companies managing COVID-19 disruptions. These targeted offerings can be rapidly deployed within 3-4 weeks:

• Treasury and Working Capital Predictor to gain a rapid view into liquidity impacts, including cash flow forecasting, late payment prediction, and real-time receivables reporting.
• Cost Visibility with AI and Machine Learning to enable real-time spend management decisions and develop the value case for cost optimization based on industry benchmarks.
• Connected Enterprise Planning to forecast and model the impacts of external factors on the balance sheet and P&L, balancing macroeconomic analysis with business granularity.
• Rapid Remote Financial Close Management to automate and remotely manage key control and compliance processes to ensure the continuation of critical business performance analyses.

Addressing these four key areas can help finance functions acquire the resilience and agility needed to navigate uncertainty with confidence – now, amid the immediate global challenges, and in whatever economic and societal situations come next.

Next steps

Discover these and other partner offers designed to help you get back to best with your employees, customers, and business.

Hear how Accenture and SAP are helping Cargill drive change with SAP Central FInance:

A catalyst for change in your finance transformation.