Pre-Conference Workshops: Monday, July 20, 2009

Please click on the links below to learn more:

Workshop A: Building the Business Case for Shared Services in Finance and Accounting
Workshop B: Top Benchmarking Strategies to Prove Continuous Added Value of Your Shared Services Center
Workhsop C: The Next Generation in Assessing and Managing Risk
Workshop D: Accounts Payable Bootcamp: Leveraging Technology to Automate and Optimize Invoicing

8:00 – 10:45 Workshop A: Building the Business Case for Shared Services in Finance and Accounting

7:30 Coffee and Registration

This workshop will guide you through how to structure and deliver a successful business case for shared services in finance and accounting. You will learn how to identify and gather information that is critical to convince senior management to support your initiative, quantify and detail the associated costs and quantifiable (labor and non-labor) and non-quantifiable benefits of your proposed solution. We will address different business case structures depending on where your shared services organization is in its lifecycle.

What will be covered:

Providing a background and context to the proposal
Communication strategy to present business needs, options for meeting these needs, costs and benefits
Structure to estimate costs, benefits, and related financial metrics of the proposed solution
Providing a baseline for cost management during development and future benefit tracking
Establishing success criteria How you will benefit:
Benchmark with fellow workshop participants on communication strategies that work
Avoid common mistakes in business case writing
Practice your pitch
Brainstorm answers to common push-back questions from senior management

Workshop leader to be confirmed

11:00 – 1:45 Workshop B: Top Benchmarking Strategies to Prove Continuous Added Value of Your Shared Services Center

10:30 Registration. Lunch will be served

The future of your shared services organization is dependent on your organization’s ability to trend and benchmark its performance, internally and with your competitors. How do you know if you are being successful? Fully optimizing a mature, single or multi-functional shared services center can be challenging. And don’t forget your customer! Learn to provide consistent and measurable customer service to ensure that the enterprise understands the true value of your shared services organization. In this interactive workshop you will zoom in on ways to measure the performance of people, processes and systems.

What will be covered:

Tough times require fact based decisions
Performance Improvement is everyone’s responsibility
Leverage your technology investment to provide visibility and control of your processes
The best companies get better during the down cycles, how to stay focused and become stronger
Building quantifiable measures into the performance plans of your staff How you will benefit:
Ten missed cost savings opportunities
Ten self-funded improvement opportunities without the consultants
Ten improvement opportunities with less than 6 months ROI
Ten actions to get the most from your technology investments
Ten steps required to define and adopt a measurement culture

Workshop leader:

David Hebert
C3 insight

2:00 – 4:45 Workhsop C: The Next Generation in Assessing and Managing Risk

1:30 Registration

In the current economy, stakes for risk management decisions are higher than ever and thus these decisions need to be supported by a higher level of detail. Determining that appropriate level of detail is a matter of understanding and grappling with variables that inevitably challenge the risk management process. There is a need to be able to critically assess the effectiveness and efficiency of all sources of risk management information and define areas of potential exposure. In this workshop, learn how to:

Establish an effective analytic approach to performing a risk analysis of a company’s controls and vendor management
Identify specific areas of fraud in the procure-to-pay process
Benchmark best practices, do’s and don’ts with your peers

Workshop leader:

Kevin O’Connor
APEX Analytix

5:00 – 7:45 Workshop D: Accounts Payable Bootcamp: Leveraging Technology to Automate and Optimize Invoicing

4:30 Registration

AP is often wrought with manual and inefficient processes that cause huge delays and become very costly to the organisation . In an economic downturn, many organizations are reacting by undertaking an across-the-board cost cutting exercise, targeting IT, spend and procurement specifically. Attend this workshop to learn how a focus on internal cost optimization programs aiming at longer-term process improvements that align the business objectives of reducing operating costs and expenses, and improve efficiencies..

What will be covered:

Analysis of AP processes, pain points and costs
Cost-benefit framework to identify cost-savings and ROI through automation of invoicing/document flow
Targeting early payment discounts How you will benefit:
Benchmark you current AP practices to identify areas for improvement and recognized/unrecognized processing costs
Develop an AP process improvement business case
Take-away best practices and do’s and don’ts lists of technology selection, implementation and management

Workshop leaders:

John Craig
Readsoft and client

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