“The CFO and his or her finance staff must be attuned to the drivers of the business, and must be able to work closely with operations management as well as with executive management to chart the financial and strategic impacts of prospective growth strategies.”
CFO Research Services.
As we often discuss, an OSS is no longer just a tool for use by network operations. These tools have the ability to improve the function of many other business units within a CSP (and within their customers). We recently reviewed how an OSS could increase its relevance to the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and today we look at how it can help the CFO (Chief Financial Officer).
As was mentioned in an earlier post, “Many staff within telcos have no concept of how the money flows through their organisation, nor do OSS/BSS implementation teams.” A CFO however, should have their finger right on this pulse of cash-flows and margins, not to mention future returns.
Your CFO should be able to provide the OSS/BSS team with a raft of metrics that if improved, could increase the value of your organisation. These might include metrics such as customer activation speed, time to market of new services, lead-to-cash cycle times, stock turnover, lost sales, project delays, SLA breaches, billing errors, incorrect shipping, multiple truck rolls, revenue or asset leakage, contract delays and the like.
You’ll have noticed that your OSS/BSS can make use of these types of metrics in two pivotal ways:
An OSS/BSS can have a profound impact on the metrics that help the CFO to increase the value of your organisation and reduce its risks, so I’d recommend forming a close relationship with your CFO to better understand your business.
An added benefit is that it’s often the CFO that approves the OSS/BSS budgets or projects so it certainly doesn’t hurt to make their job easier and to make them aware of how important the OSS/BSS is to the company’s future returns. 😉
Over the years, I’ve often referred to The Corkscrew Analogy or Momentum Spiral to describe a mindset of incremental improvement that’s needed to keep an
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Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
