How to stay ahead in today’s highly competitive business market while staying within a tight budget? It’s a million-dollar question, but the answer is actually not that complex and it might surprise you (well, probably not because you’ve read the title, but still): CAD optimization.

That’s right, computer-aided design systems can help your business streamline a variety of operations, save money long-term, and, most importantly, produce innovative products, thereby staying ahead of your competition. And no, they’re not just for big corporations with deep pockets – today, there are plenty of budget-friendly CAD software solutions that even small businesses can easily afford.

What are CAD Systems?

Let’s start with the basics by defining CAD systems, and then we’ll move on to how to use them to optimize your operations, innovate, cut costs, and more.

In simplest terms, computer-aided design (CAD) systems are digital tools designed to help engineers and designers create, modify, and optimize their designs. These designs can be anything from commercial lifestyle products to buildings. In essence, using this process, your business can create 3D design simulations of real-world products, complete with scale and physics properties, to optimize and perfect them before manufacturing.

As you can probably tell, this means fewer costly mistakes and less wasted time and resources. Now, you might be thinking, “Sure, this sounds great, but isn’t it expensive?” It’s a common misconception, but the truth is that there are now affordable CAD software solutions that, yes, require some initial investment but, in the long run, save you money.

Investing in Your Business's Future

Before we jump into the benefits of using CAD systems, let’s talk about how to choose the right one for your business.

If you have a small business and are unsure if investing in CAD optimization is a smart move, let us assure you that it is: the long-term benefits (which we’ll go into in the next section) far outweigh the costs. Which, as we mentioned, don’t even have to be steep.

Let’s take SOLIDWORKS vs Fusion 360 as examples as they’re currently some of the most popular CAD software options on the market for both small and medium-sized businesses. Fusion 360 is a cloud-based program that can be assessed from anywhere, making it great for remote teams. It combines parametric, direct, and mesh modelling tools, but it's a user-friendly, affordable option that can practically be used by anyone, even folks with no prior experience with CAD software.

SOLIDWORKS, on the other hand, is more expensive but also better at advanced modelling, making it a better option for businesses that design products with multiple components. It’s probably one of the best CAD software for industries like engineering and manufacturing.

So, let’s say you’re considering one of these two programs: which one should you choose? While some people may think they should invest in a pricier option if they want maximum benefits – after all, it offers all the bells and whistles – this might not be true at all. The choice between these two – and any other CAD systems – should first and foremost depend on your industry, specific design needs, and, of course, your budget.

The moral of the story is, when considering investing in CAD optimization, always, always take time to consider your business’ specific needs and requirements.

Benefits of CAD Software

• Streamlining Workflows and Increasing Efficiency: CAD software allows you to automate repetitive tasks, collaborate with remote teams in real-time, and easily share designs with clients. This saves time and helps prevent miscommunication and delays, increasing your efficiency.
• Reducing Prototyping Costs: Using CAD optimization, you can create virtual prototypes that accurately simulate real-world conditions, minimizing the need for physical prototypes. This, in turn, reduces costs and accelerates the development process.
• Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy: By allowing designers to make changes to their prototypes easily (and cost-free), CAD systems also ensure that their designs are always up-to-date and error-free. This, too, can lead to significant cost savings for small businesses.
• Maximizing Return on Investment: By reducing design times, minimizing errors, and bringing products to market faster, you can maximize your ROI and make your business grow faster. This, in turn, can further improve your competitiveness and profitability.
• Adapting to Market and Staying Competitive: To remain competitive, your business needs to be agile and adaptable, which is where CAD programs can be of immense help. By leveraging CAD optimization, you can quickly iterate on your designs in response to changing market demands, trends, and customer feedback, bringing innovative products to market faster.

All in all, any business that wants to become more innovative, competitive, and operate more efficiently with fewer costs, should consider investing in an industry-appropriate CAD program.

The shared service approach provides a centre of excellence within large businesses, but according to Andrew Hayden, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Winshuttle, the challenge finance organisations often face is how to successfully transition separate business units’ processes and data into one single set of systems, and it can be an onerous process which, unless handled correctly, could result in less efficiency, not more.

The shared services model can help corporate finance teams meet their efficiency targets but avoiding the inefficiency trap caused by moving and transforming financial data into one place is essential if the business is going to meet strict efficiency targets.

Beyond ‘lift and shift’

When an organisation decides to move to a centralised shared service approach, the first step is usually to pull existing financial processes out of the hands of disparate accounting functions and business subsidiaries and pass them all into the new central function. Adopting this new structure typically means one team now handles all financial transactions, but they are still using a variety of systems – from spreadsheets and homegrown software to individual accounting platforms.

Implementing shared services requires a high degree of change within the business, and so it makes sense to maximise the benefits of doing so. This can only really be achieved when the actual financial processes themselves are streamlined to one central financial platform, quite commonly SAP.

A significant part of this system consolidation is the movement of data from A to B. Moving huge volumes of data manually is slow and time-consuming, and one approach that some shared service centres are adopting to significantly speed up operations is robotic process automation (RPA).

RPA in action

Here, we look at how SAP-specific RPA software solutions helped organisations including Vodafone, Anglo-American, and Novacon successfully streamline data in their shared financial services environments.

Vodafone decreases transaction processing time

At Vodafone, the shared financial services centre now handles the bulk of the organisation’s financial management, processes and transactions including fixed assets, Purchase to Pay, Record to Report and General Ledger.

Handling considerable volumes of assets within one SAP database proved challenging in this dynamic and frequently changing environment. In one area of the business, Vodafone had nine million assets and 100 thousand postings per month, which would typically take six months to process.

The task of doing so included using five different SAP screens and two different transactions, so a 100-line item record would take up to 60 minutes to process manually. To drive shared services efficiency, Vodafone used an SAP-specific RPA solution. It automatically posts data to SAP via Vodafone Excel workbooks, eliminating data entry through the SAP GUI and reducing the processing time to 15 minutes.

“The system works very well for us,” says Peter Barta, Asset and Project Accounting Team Leader, Vodafone, adding “our complicated processes are handled in fewer steps, which reduces time spent on complex postings and allows us to avoid any internal IT debt.”

Anglo-American increase efficiency savings by 80%

Anglo-American needed to implement a global shared services project to optimise business processes through common procedures. This required thousands of entries that needed to be manually processed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This repetitive and time-consuming task needed an effective solution without increasing resource capacity.

By choosing an SAP-specific RPA solution, Anglo-American was able to overcome these challenges without needing to employ specialists to transfer volumes of data. Procedures that would normally take a week now take only a day to process, increasing efficiency savings by 80%.

Novacon prevents data entry errors before they happen

Novacon, a lean management data company, faced challenges with data and process accuracy when working with a large shared service centre. Using an SAP-specific RPA solution it validated data entry against all business and SAP rules, preventing errors before they happen with a rate of 99+% accuracy in SAP. This also enabled a shorter development time of two months and at a lower cost compared to generic RPA technology.

Without doubt, shared services centres offer significant potential for finance to become more efficient, but it must be approached correctly, especially when it comes to the transference of data. Otherwise the organisation could find itself stuck in the inefficiency trap.

Below Dave Orme, SVP, IDEX Biometrics, discusses the challenging landscape of payments and fraud, the fight against scammers and the obstacles the future will find in a cashless society.

Clearing up the mess left behind by fraudsters is a serious challenge and sees financial institutions having to absorb the monetary and logistical damage of card payment fraud daily. Meanwhile, consumers are left with a feeling of dread when they see transactions, that they know they haven’t made, on their payment card accounts. Finding themselves needing to take time away from work or home, to report stolen cards, cancel cards and wait for new ones. Not only is this frustrating for cardholders, it takes a huge amount of time investment by banks to resource this process. Payment card fraud is a serious problem that affects every one of us.

In fact, card fraud is a serious and increasingly urgent problem. Financial Fraud Action UK (FFA UK) reports that in 2016, fraud across payment cards, remote banking and cheques totalled an astonishing £1.38 billion, an increase of 2% on the previous year. The overwhelming majority (80%) of this fraud involved payment cards; there was a particularly large (30%) increase in the proportion of cards lost and stolen, and these alone accounted for losses of £96.3 million.

There is no single reason for these figures; impersonation and deception scams, as well as data breaches, have all played their part. But the UK is becoming an increasingly cashless state — debit card payments overtook cash payments for the first time recently — so we have no real option but to stop the fraudsters. The obvious question is, how?

Fighting back

Financial institutions currently bear much of the impact of card fraud, and in response are investing heavily in machine learning, predictive analytics and other cutting-edge technologies to beat the criminals. These are having some effect; in 2017, fraud losses on payment cards fell somewhat (which contrasts with 2016, as we have seen), but even so there was still £566 million lost to payment card fraud alone and seven pence in every £100 spent was fraudulent — a very worrying statistic in a society that is rapidly increasing its reliance on cards.

In other words, payment card fraud has been a huge problem for a sustained period of time and the steps currently being taken to stop it are not effective enough.

Human nature

In a society that relies more and more on technology, payment cards are the weak link; or rather, the behaviours of the people who own and use payment cards are the weak link. It is human nature to make the mundane administration of life easier — but we all know how dangerous writing down your PIN because you keep forgetting it (and worse, keeping the card and the PIN together) can be. Many people are also guilty of sharing their PIN and card with their friend/partner/relative to enable transactions without the need to be present. Others give out cards and PINs to trusted people because they are elderly or have mobility problems and getting the necessities of life is so much easier that way. All these behaviours are very common, but they are also making card crime very easy.

People fail to keep their PINs or other card details safe not because they are inherently foolish or lazy, but because PINs are simply unfit for purpose. To be effective they demand a far higher standard of discipline and security from human nature than human nature is ever likely to give. The result is a massive headache for individuals, financial institutions and businesses all over the world.

But if not PINs, then what?

Giving the finger to fraudsters

Biometrics, including fingerprint recognition, is a field increasingly recognised as holding the key to card fraud prevention as such fraud becomes a more and more urgent problem. And while financial services may be looking at large-scale use of biometrics now, in other security-conscious sectors this has already happened. For example, many smartphones (which are themselves fast becoming the twenty-first century replacement for the wallet) are protected via fingerprint authentication, usually via a sensor on the lock screen. Passports are also routinely issued with biometric authentication built in, as are government ID cards. Biometrics are used where security is non-negotiable.

Until recently, including biometric authentication in a payment card was very difficult. This is because it required a sensor to be incorporated in the card and for many years those sensors were too large and inflexible to make that viable. However, there have been breakthroughs in this technology recently and we are now able to deliver a very thin, flexible fingerprint sensor that is easy to add to a standard card, so the major barrier to using biometrics with payment cards has now been overcome.

Looking ahead

Biometrics companies are now working in partnership with banks and other financial institutions, smartphone manufacturers and payment processing firms, to make gold standard authentication affordable, practical and available for payment card users and issuers. This is very good news for those in financial and security businesses, because the roll-out of biometrics in those fields will relieve much of the pressure of fighting what is, frankly, now a losing battle. With the arrival of simple, secure and personal authentication for all, hopefully we will see the demise of that twenty-first century pickpocket that is the payment card fraudster.

Three quarters of finance decision makers within UK businesses have admitted that their company could be susceptible to fraud because of poor accounts payable systems, according to a new report.

And 70% of finance decision makers also admitted that a failure to implement robust purchase order processing within their company was also putting them at severe risk from fraud.

In fact according to the ‘Changing trends in the purchasing processes of UK businesses’ report commissioned by document managing, accounts payable and purchasing solution provider Invu, less than a quarter (24%) of decision makers are ‘completely confident’ that they could prevent or detect fraud with their current systems.

The risk from fraud is also not limited by company size, according to the research, with 25% of large businesses and 30% of small companies harbouring some concerns about fraud due to weak processes and checks.

“Although we’ve seen a slight reduction in the amount of financial decision makers concerned about fraud, it is clear that concerns remain high within Britain’s business community and that not enough is being done to protect companies from becoming victims of fraud,” said Ian Smith, GM and Finance Director at Invu.

“Fraud is a huge problem for any business, with the results being potentially fatal. Automated processes, which can monitor purchase and payment processes, go a long way to prevent and detect these issues, but they are clearly not being deployed enough within UK businesses.”

(Source: Invu)

Legacy systems are preventing nearly two thirds (64%) of US commercial banks from developing Fintech applications, research commissioned by Fintech provider Fraedom has revealed.

Interestingly, 82% of the respondents that highlighted this concern were shareholders. Over half of those polled also noted a lack of expertise within banks as an important concern (56%), just ahead of limited resources (53%).

The study included decision-makers in commercial banks including shareholders and senior managers as well as middle managers.

Commercial banks outsourcing services to a Fintech provider is clearly a trend on the rise, with only 22% of US banks revealing that they do not outsource any payment services compared to 30% of their UK counterparts.

Kyle Ferguson, CEO, Fraedom, said: “This research highlights that legacy systems are standing in the way of US commercial banks developing Fintech applications. This in turn is resulting in certain services such as commercial card and expenses being outsourced by more than three quarters of banks. It is now recognised that Fintech firms can help banks overcome these technical issues and benefit from previously untapped revenue-making opportunities.”

The research also discovered a growing inclination among commercial banks to partner with Fintech firms. The main reason for this shift is to help bring new products to market faster, as recognised by 94% of respondents.

The second most popular reason given for partnering with a Fintech was that to attract ‘new customer segments’ supported by 82% of respondents, followed by 76% who said it was to help ‘differentiate themselves from competitors’.

“US banks are beginning to see the rewards of partnering with a Fintech provider, especially when helping to bring products to market faster.” Ferguson added: “Established Fintech firms can understand the technical challenges that banks are struggling to cope with in local markets and provide an easy yet very effective solution while often differentiating them from their customers.”

(Source: Fraedom)

Jumping into a big company merger can be daunting, and while legal and financial steps take place, actual company operations, staff and systems are also a massive part of the merger. Here Ian Currie, ‎Director of EMEA business development, Dell Boomi walks Finance Monthly through some key considerations to make in the internal merger process.

Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is booming. One thing is for certain there are a number of considerations business leaders need to take before embarking on a merger or acquisition. In particular, in the current political and economic climate, it is critical for investors to analyse all aspects of the company in question – from its value to customers, its business model and growth plans, all the way through to its existing IT infrastructure.

Digital or die

In today’s digital age, ensuring that IT not only works, but enables and drives business performance has never been more important in a merger or acquisition. A slick, digital-first approach ultimately sets one company apart from the competition.

Failure to get digital right can have a disastrous impact for any company. New players in the industry have been designed with a ‘data-first’ approach and are agile and flexible enough to meet customer expectations. An inability for legacy businesses to digitally transform and adapt at speed - or at least faster than the competition - is, therefore, one of the main reasons businesses fail. In fact, two-thirds of executives predicting that 200 Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years’ time due to digital disruption.

With this in mind, and as the world becomes increasingly reliant on the digital economy, it is clear that IT should not be an after-thought when considering an acquisition.

However, with some many apps across an organisation and with huge amounts of data sitting in various siloed systems, IT in M&A can be incredibly challenging. Coupling this with the size, scale and complexity of any takeover or merger, how can businesses ensure they are set up for success?

Merging not displacing

Following the completion of a merger, a company’s CEO will typically request the CIO to just ‘combine the IT systems’. This often involves a painfully long procedure in which all data, applications and systems are forced into the incumbents systems. By not necessarily taking into account the complexity and hurdles that must be overcome, these efforts often result in wasted time, lost efficiency and reduced performance.

What’s more, making this change also typically forces the acquired company to alter its business model, potentially altering the aspects of the business that made it such an attractive proposition in the first place. This mindset of one company, essentially, displacing another must change.

A merger shouldn’t be the prerequisite to changing how a business works - after all, they wouldn’t be making the acquisition if the business model needed change. Businesses, therefore, need to consider what each company can bring to the party. For example, while a firm can buy the incumbent’s immediate revenue, it cannot maintain and strengthen its existing customer relationships without real-time, accurate and intuitive business intelligence to ensure its communications with customers and prospects are contextually relevant.

By having a clear understanding of the digital landscape, executives can make smart decisions for new models of working, whereby IT can enhance operations rather than hindering them.

Integration is integral

Making an acquisition should enable firms to ‘buy’ immediate revenue and customer opportunities, but without the aid of business intelligence, companies may struggle to build on, or even, maintain customer relationships. After all, it is widely accepted that the easiest way to grow a company is to cross-sell and upsell to its existing customer base.

However, with customer data in silos, organisations cannot keep track of what information their teams are putting in front of them and how the relationship is being maintained. Without this knowledge, relationships can be weakened or even finalised. With dedicated technology to integrate data, apps and systems quickly and efficiently, companies can quickly regain control, ensuring all the dots are joined up.

Integration solutions prove invaluable here. They provide a fast and flexible user experience, centralising the creation, maintenance and updating of integrations through simple drag-and-drop interfaces that eliminate the need for coding - bringing both sets of date, apps and systems together at speed and with ease.

Only by ensuring processes, applications and data can be integrated quickly and effectively can companies truly benefit from their newly merged firms. If the predictions are correct and more companies look to merge in the coming months, it will be critical for businesses to look to integration solution to join the dots and set themselves up for success.

Many banks are facing the ‘double-whammy’ of having to replace their ageing systems while also having to reduce their overall IT spend. Finextra asserts that 80% of banks will replace their core systems within the next three years. Grant Thomas, Head of Practices at BJSS tells Finance Monthly it’s more likely that it will take between five and ten years before this journey is completed.

It may come as a surprise to learn that many banks rely on systems written in COBOL (and even Assembler). Some of these run on hardware whose spare parts can only be sourced from Gumtree.

Many of the technologies underpinning core systems are at least 20 years old and the people who support them are even older. Assembler anybody? Fortran? Zumba and whist drives may soon be replaced in retirement communities with therapeutic programming.

Time is literally running out for our time-honoured financial institutions. They have left it too late, mostly (and perhaps understandably) as a result of prioritising revenue growth and meeting fiduciary obligations.

However, it is also human nature to put off doing hard things until the last moment. Which begs the question: is IT modernisation as hard as everyone thinks it is? The biggest challenges may not be either technical or financial in nature.

7 steps to success

1. Get a sponsor with big boots

The bank is going to be spending a lot of money (between tens and hundreds of millions) so you’ll need someone senior to argue the case that your plans are of sufficiently high priority to get funded. You’ll also need someone who will keep the funds flowing when third quarter results are pressurising IT budgets.

2. Start at the end

While the first question is usually ‘why’, it should probably be ‘what will we get out of this?’ instead. It’s a subtle difference, but one which reorients the discussion from ‘problem’ to ‘benefit’.  The answer to this question will probably depend on who is asking. For the Board, the answer needs to be a blend of the strategic (‘how will this help us to deliver future plans?’) and the tactical (‘what does this do for our C:I ratio?’). For P&L owners it might be ‘when do I see the benefit?’ and CIOs will want to know ‘what will this look like when we’ve built it?’

3. Fail fast

Whilst it’s important to celebrate success and build positive momentum, organisations should also acknowledge that every failure is an opportunity to learn. People will be asking ‘will this work?’ and ‘how will we…?’  A lack of certainty combined with a natural fear of failure will impede progress unless the organisation embraces risk from the outset.

4. Share the benefits

Technical Debt isn’t glamorous and doesn’t attract the same attention (or funding) as other types of IT delivery. It can therefore be beneficial to deliver some components of your overall IT modernisation on the coat tails of other projects or sources of funding. For example, a project to deliver an improved digital customer experience might provide the perfect opportunity to deliver the shared components that will replace a legacy solution.

5. Prioritise something

There’s an inherent risk of trying to do too much. Try to be clear about what you want to achieve and when. Understand how you will prioritise scope and benefits. Get agreement from your Sponsor and ensure that the rest of your organisation knows what you will do and what you won’t. Guard this jealously!

6. Pick your dependencies

This is possibly the biggest challenge for core systems replacement. There will be more dependencies than would seem possible to manage. To help mitigate this, it will be necessary to both reduce the number and extent dependencies when possible and industrialise dependency management.

7. Don’t forget to run the business

Big technology and change programmes can be a big drain on an organisation’s resources. They often require skills and experience which may be in short supply - if they even exist at all! Significant amounts of staff, management and executive time will be diverted from BAU activity to the programme. Organisations typically underestimate the impact of this and are caught out by falling business performance.

Banks which fail to modernise are missing an important point: their problem isn’t going to go away. Through inaction they place themselves at unnecessary risk, and might even be failing in their fiduciary obligations. Replacing core banking systems isn’t as hard as it looks, and a ‘legacypocalypse’ can be easily avoided with a mission directed team applying these seven steps.