When it comes to building your treasury strategy, considering your organization’s level of process maturity is key. An Organization’s treasury process is many-faceted. Treasurers and treasury managers alike are responsible for a host of tasks within their organizations, including cash management, bank reconciliations, and integrating ERP payments just to name a few. To solve treasury process pain points, you can’t rely entirely on implementing the latest treasury technology. You’ll need to consider your current processes, people, technology, and procedures behind those processes. When trying to understand treasury process maturity, Elire evaluates maturity along a five-point continuum: informal, functional, standardized, collaborative, leading. Taking stock of where you are is needed for developing an effective strategy.
In these beginning stages, informal treasury processes are categorized by unorganized, chaotic results with no defined process. At the functional level, operations are consistent and reliable, the process is predictable and manageable. Standardized processes are high performance and designed end-to-end to yield superior performance. The collaborative stage is integrated with other processes. Processes are integrated with enterprise processes and strategy. And finally, at the leading level, the process is extended beyond the organization, outside the company and extends to suppliers yields world-class results.
In addition to identifying where your organizations’ processes are, there are five critical enablers of process performance we look at to strategize and determine the best path forward:
- Design: specification of the work activities in the process
- Metrics: how the process is measured, baselined, and how improvements are determined
- Owners: who is accountable and in charge of the process
- Performers: who is actually executing the work? What are their skills and knowledge
- Infrastructure: information systems that support the process and HR systems that manage the performers
Creating a picture of your treasury process using these five critical enablers of process performance allows the team to determine and calculate the next steps of moving towards a more mature treasury process. Taking stock of these five enablers is essential to determining where your process may have shortcomings and how best to move forward. A focus on purely technology-based solutions can be tempting, but oftentimes an in-depth look at the current processes and the people involved is the most valuable solution. Wherever you are in your process journey, you’ll need to consider all these enablers to make changes.
Elire’s industry experts are ready to work with you to solve your treasury pain-points and identify disconnects and solutions for your current system. Reach out to [email protected] for specific questions and to set up a discovery call. In the meantime, view our webinar recording of “Building a Digital Treasury Strategy” here.