Author Archives: Helene Abrams

Mergers & Acquisitions: Building an ERP Toolkit for Smooth Transitions

In the modern business landscape, global organizations are finding enhanced growth and competitive success from expanding their merger, acquisition, divestiture, and organizational change activities. For the well-prepared ERP professionals, this can feel like embarking on an exciting and long-awaited road trip, for others, it can be a harrowing journey of lost time and wrong turns […]

How Do You Calculate the Cost of a Spreadsheet?

This article takes an insightful look into the cost of a single spreadsheet that is used for financial consolidation.  Many companies ignore the high cost of maintaining spreadsheets because they have already purchased Excel or another package, and there are not huge license fees.   Spreadsheets are great tools for short, small projects, but care […]

Five Steps to Take an Enterprise Apps Implementation from “Finished” to “Done”

Enterprise applications must continually evolve to support ongoing business changes. Frequently companies reach a stage where their ERP applications have “functional capability” but do not efficiently support the business process and are not easily adaptable. The below method operates at the individual application level as well as the enterprise ecosystem level to help companies obtain […]

The Business vs. IT: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

It is no surprise that IT is not always aligned with business goals.  The conflicts arise because IT is often unaware of how the business uses the systems that IT is responsible for installing and supporting, and the business is often unaware of exactly what is involved in an IT project.  There are several other […]

Change as a Growth Enabler

Despite the inevitability of change, the resistance to it is so pervasive that it has inspired numerous publications and an entire industry of change management experts dedicated to overcoming it. The inability to change is certainly seen as a major flaw in business, resulting in the call for agile management, agile IT, and agile thinking. […]

Into the Future (And Back Again)

Designing an accounting flexfield is one of the most difficult processes in an Oracle® implementation. Often, the failure to look far enough ahead during the initial implementation can impede business growth, and certainly makes it difficult to have your data truly ready for a fast-paced future. A “good” chart of accounts has the following criteria: […]

The Importance of Finance Management Systems in Digital Transformation

Navigation in the modern world of global enterprise is often an exercise in duality. While developments in the digital world open doors to value-growth for businesses, they also increase the strain on business leaders to maintain hard-won forward momentum. According to the 2022 PwC Pulse Survey[1], 60% of surveyed C-Level executives reported ‘Digital Transformation’ to […]

Five Considerations to Make When Incorporating Automation into an Audit Process

New areas of risk and new demands in reporting and stakeholder expectations, require the expertise of a modern internal audit team that evolves year over year. Businesses are responding to this challenge by adopting automation to streamline their workflows and build value. Consider these five elements as you evaluate the integration of automation into your […]

Material Misstatement? or Massive Mistake? Key Questions for Auditors who Discover Potential Fraud

Uncovering alleged fraud or suspicious financial activities within an organization’s financial statement audit is both a nightmare for many (catching management and governance sectors off guard) and a difficult reality for the auditor or auditing teams involved. Auditors define fraud, in the context of a financial audit, as “an intentional act by one or more […]

Benefits of Integrating RPA into Audit

More and more modern businesses are seeing the benefit in deploying an integration of robotic process automation (RPA) into their organization’s internal audit plan. By embracing the age of automation, businesses can pocket substantial cost-savings and reap organizational benefits in finance departments of all sizes. In leveraging automation and advanced analytics, organizations can garner quality […]