Unum Finance Chief Stresses Relevance of Advocating for Digital Transformation

Main Money Officer

Steve Zabel

talks about how the Chattanooga, Tenn.-primarily based corporation bought rid of spreadsheets, what he needs task candidates to deliver and why finance chiefs perform an vital purpose in advertising and marketing automation endeavours. This is the fifth component of a series that focuses on how CFOs and other executives digitize their finance operations. Edited excerpts abide by.

WSJ: What are the major measures you took as a corporation to modernize your finance operate?

Mr. Zabel: The very first move we took was around some of our actuarial income movement versions. We benefit from these to do pricing and forecasting and seriously every thing around [financial performance]. We commenced that back in 2013 and we’ve now cycled by all of our products and got [them] on a reliable system. Then, in 2017, we carried out two matters which have been truly handy. We introduced in a new standard ledger and we set in a [configurable reporting technology]. We do all of our economic reporting off of that.

What that authorized us to do is at the company level get rid of all the consolidation, all the spreadsheets. Stage two has been to now glance at the accounting procedures that we have and start off to use extra precise automation technological innovation.

WSJ: What are your vital targets?

Mr. Zabel: There is a couple of items, [including] the high quality of the get the job done that our individuals are carrying out. It is them [having to] expend fewer time compiling data for the goal of generating journal entries and also compiling info just to do basic reporting. So shifting them from that type of perform to far more assessment and functioning with our product or service traces. It’s a quite aggressive environment for talent. Whichever we can do to make it a extra gratifying knowledge for employees is going to enable us in the prolonged run.

WSJ: Is there an estimate how considerably time your staff members help you save with these new technologies?

Mr. Zabel: I have a whole lot of purposeful areas underneath me and some of them are more concentrated on the real economic reporting and journal entries than some of the many others. On normal, people areas probably used 70% to 80% of their time just receiving the transactions finished and then finding the information again out of the ledger to be equipped to review [them]. We have now moved that much more in the direction of 50/50. What we’d like to do is wholly flip that [to] in which they only commit perhaps 20% of their time essentially processing transactions.

WSJ: How are you aiding them do that?

Mr. Zabel: How we’re approaching it is we’ve introduced in these tools and we’ve started off to exhibit [our employees] what the applications are, but also give them case research of how they’ve been used.

WSJ: What is still left to be carried out right before you strike the 20% target?

Mr. Zabel: There’s a number of parts that we even now need to operate on. A single is details. Any time you start out a electronic transformation, it all commences with the knowledge you have. Some of our knowledge is in genuinely good form. [For] some of it, we still have some perform to do. So I assume there is some foundational regions the place the details desires to be in a improved form, but then it’s just creating the bandwidth for our groups to teach on their own on the applications and generate the capability for them to be ready to implement them.

WSJ: What is your head count in finance, and do you count on it to shrink as you automate additional?

Mr. Zabel: We have just over 500 men and women ideal now in the finance firm, out of a total staff base of about 10,000. What we’re definitely trying to do with driving efficiencies is not so considerably acquire head depend out, it’s more about redeploying all those assets to fixing more business enterprise problems for our company associates. I have no options to decrease head count inside the group. I would somewhat commit those people assets and redeploy them to enable the firm expand in different approaches.

WSJ: What are you seeking for when you evaluate likely candidates?

Mr. Zabel: It is extremely critical that we have people that have a good specialized foundation. We have a good deal of formally qualified accountants and actuaries in just the business. We also have people that have a true details science background. Going ahead, what we’ll will need extra of are men and women that can translate company procedures into [automation opportunities]. [For] a good deal of the resources that are available these days you really don’t seriously have to be that tech enabled in your official background. They’re incredibly configurable.

WSJ: How would you explain your part as CFO in this?

Mr. Zabel: You certainly have to be an advocate for it. Using the prospect every time you can to emphasize and acknowledge when we have these “ring the bell” moments exactly where individuals have used technology to improve their company procedures is really vital. I imagine the other thing is just staying plugged into what we’re executing with our digital method additional broadly. I’m tied at the hip with the individual that runs our [information technology] office and also our electronic transform agenda.

Produce to Nina Trentmann at [email protected]