(Publisher’s note: Our challenge to each reader is to pick and view one great CFO /AP / Finance Leadership session today!) 

Our inaugural CPO Rising 2K20 Virtual Series brought more than 2000 procurement, finance, and HR professionals together around the topics that matter to business leaders right now (i.e. how to ensure continuity, build resilience, and prepare for the recovery). These webinars (or sessions) are available On-Demand through the end of May (click to view or simply read below).

With more than 20 hours of great presentations from leading Chief Procurement Officers, Chief Financial Officers, and other global experts, the series is a great resource for CPOs, CFOs, as well as finance, procurement and other business leaders. To make it easier to find the session (or sessions :-)) that best apply to your role/team/employer, we’ve organized them into four different tracks with unique job roles in mind. Today, we discuss The CFO and Finance Leadership Track.

The CFO and Finance/AP Leadership (Track 3)

This track consists of four presentations by and for CFOs and finance leaders covering topics and themes that matter today and in the future.  Those themes include CFO leadership, strategies for executing a business continuity plan, maximizing spend management with AP tools and data, and how to leverage supply chain finance both now and moving forward.

CFO Leadership in Time of Coronavirus (starring Vic Chynoweth)

At a time when cash is more important than ever, there is, perhaps, no more important executive than the CFO. Gain a view into how CFO’s should be responding to the Coronavirus pandemic with Vic Chynoweth, CFO and COO of Jaggaer, as he discusses what a CFO needs to do to lead their company in the time of the Coronavirus. Vic’s advice includes:

• “The worst mistake a CFO can make in times like this is overconfidence and bravado.”
• “Liquidity, cash management, optimizing cash, visibility and alignment, are critical. CFOs need to understand what this means to their company and how they need to respond to it.”
•  “CFOs must consider how they can help both employees and customers – they need a people first mentality.”
• “The most important part of a CFO’s job is to help businesses make good decisions, and improved communication with procurement is critical.”

Prevent, Manage, Recover: Key Strategies to Execute a Business Continuity Plan (starring Larry Williams)

Larry Williams is executive with almost 40 years’ experience at Proctor & Gamble who has spent his career transforming the people, processes, and solutions needed to drive a Best-in-Class P2P operation within a Shared Services environment.  To maintain business operations in a business environment hit by the coronavirus and rife with global uncertainty, every enterprise needs a plan. A Business Continuity Plan (“BCP”) is the set of procedures and processes used in the event of a business interruption to maintain company operations until the supply chain returns to “normal” state.  In this session Larry explains how to execute a BCP across its three phases so that a P2P operation can be constantly prepared. These phases of a BCP include:  1) Prevent 2) Manage 3) Recover. Some of Larry’s insights from the session include:

• “In a crisis, a company needs to protect its sales, profits, reputation, employees and valuable skills”
• “A BCP must include people process technology, facilities, suppliers, materials, alternate suppliers and alternate materials.
• “Organizations need to be fair with its’ suppliers because if you treat them badly now they will remember it when things get back to normal and may hold it against you.”
• “BCPs need to be updated and tested annually at a minimum – You need your back up plan ready to go”

Maximizing Spend Management with AP Tools & Data (starring Dan Reeve with Bob Cohen and Andrew Bartolini)

A well-run AP department can make a direct impact on other parts of the business, including supplier savings and overall spend management. In this session, Dan Reeve, Director of Sales at Esker, an industry veteran with over 20 years’ experience in Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash, discusses the benefits of leveraging the underlying data in AP to fuel the optimization of organizational spend.  Among Dan’s insights:

• “Companies that invest in spend management, technology and processes during dark times will come out of the crisis in better shape than their peers who do nothing.”
• “In today’s new work environment, collaboration between business functions has become more difficult, but it has also become more necessary.”
• “The benefits of AP automation and data can extend well beyond process and efficiency improvements gained from eliminating paper and manual, labor-intensive tasks.”
• “Companies are looking for the opportunity to increase visibility and see where they are at risk, and unlocking the data in AP can help them do this.”

The Role of Supply Chain Finance in Today’s COVID-19 World  (starring Christian Lanng)

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted enterprises all over the world leaving many scrambling for access to the working capital they need to survive. Organizations are laboring to ensure that both they, and their supply chains, have enough cash on hand to preserve the present but also enable the future. In this session, Christian Lanng, CEO of Tradeshift, discusses the role Supply Chain Finance can play today in helping organizations (1) increase liquidity and free up cash flow and, by doing so, (2) improve the sustainability of both organizations and their suppliers. Among Christian’s many insights:

• “We need to have a reckoning in the way our supply chains are designed, because they have shown themselves to be very fragile.”
• “The COVID-19 pandemic has been the great revealer of which companies have taken digital transformation and digitalization of their supply chain seriously.  In a way you are getting a huge separation between those who have executed well and those who have passed digitalization down the line.”
• “The first instinct of CFOs is to conserve cash on the balance sheet, and the first idea how to do this is to extend payment terms but this has the net effect of magnifying the impact on the supply chain.”
• “We will see a move to ‘sell-side’ finance (also known as accounts receivable finance), where the buyer is part of the program and endorses it but they are not underwriting it. Growth in the future will come from this.”

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Watch one of the sessions above – bet you can’t watch just one!!

The CPO Rising 2K20 Virtual Series Sessions – CPO and Procurement Leadership Track

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