Finance Skillset
Drive Optimal Financial Decisions in Real-Time
The Aera Finance Skillset lets organizations take real-time actions to keep organizations on target.
Every action of every day either moves you closer or further from your desired financial goals. The Aera Finance Skillset processes end-to-end information to assess current financial health continuously. Using pre-built crawlers that automatically pull key operational data from ERP, CRM, WMS, MRP, and other key systems, Aera maintains a current picture of the business and compares it to your set business goals. Aera Finance Skillset can immediately detect when changes in sales, demand, procurement, logistics, inventory, and production take products and business lines away from cost, revenue, share, price, and other financial targets.
By connecting operational data with their financial counterparts, the Aera Finance Skillset understands root causes for deviations at most detailed levels and makes actionable recommendations to keep the organization on track. These actions could include changing suppliers for better commodity pricing, expediting sales where inventories are in distress while pausing other promotional spending where availability is at risk, flagging non-compliant purchases in procurement, changing logistics actions to avoid penalties, or dynamically rebalancing budgets from low performing brands and business units to most promising ones. These recommendations are powered by AI decision-making models that let Aera evaluate multiple scenarios to determine the best actions at machine speed and precision. With Aera Finance Skillset, not only do you keep an eye on the outcome but you can make thousands of corrections needed to stay on target.
Benefits
- Fast time-to-value utilizing pre-built crawlers for ERP, MRP, WMS, CRM, and other key systems.
- Harmonized digital twin of your operations and your key financial measures to ensure an accurate picture of your business.
- Continuous evaluation of financial implications of every transaction across procurement, supply, commercial, and corporate areas.
- Automates data acquisition and baseline generation.
- Augments financial decisions through comprehensive intelligent models.
- Enables new ways of working through a purposely designed collaboration system between people and machines.
Aera Skills
- Integrated Business Planning (IBP) Skill orchestrates, augments, and automates the decisions made during the IBP process to meet the financial plan. The skill continuously evaluates live data across forecast plans, promotions, procurement, production, inventory, logistics, sales, finance, and product lifecycle to determine deviations against the financial plan. Aera recommends actions to mitigate deviations using initiatives, scenario modeling, and optimization algorithms.
- Profit and Loss (P&L) Planning & Forecasting Skill automates and augments P&L planning and forecasting to enable the finance department to keep plans aligned with financial targets along every step of sales and operation planning. The Skill continuously evaluates data across ERP and supply chain planning systems at a granular product level, including volume forecast, selling prices, internal transfer prices, commodities prices, and overheads. It also detects deviations in leading indicators and forecasts impacts on performance targets and leverages scenario modeling to combine recommended initiatives and mitigations to achieve P&L targets goals.
- Supply Chain Financial Planning Skill automates and augments procurement and production financial planning to achieve the best commodity prices and production costs. It uses scenario modeling around initiatives towards specific goals like cost minimization, transfer cost reduction, price variance control, and other business targets. The Skill leverages constant data feeds across forecasts, product master, inventory, commodity prices, production costs, and external market index. It also surfaces risks and opportunities to improve purchase price variance and understands the sensitivity of internal transfer prices to volume and costs to recommend plan adjustments.