Category: AI Readiness

Process Intelligence: The Modern CFO’s Tool for Smarter Finance and Risk Control
The Modern Chief Financial Officer is Navigating a Perfect Storm.

Geopolitical instability is disrupting supply chains, persistent inflation is eroding margins, and a complex web of regulations, from ESG reporting to new data privacy laws, creates a minefield of business risk. In this environment, the traditional tools, like spreadsheets and business intelligence (BI) dashboards, are no longer enough.

These tools are like a car’s rearview mirror. They tell you that margins dropped last quarter or that audit findings spiked. But they can’t tell you why. They can’t show you the traffic jam building up ahead.

To navigate today’s landscape, CFOs need a windshield, a forward-looking, real-time view into the operational DNA of the business. This is precisely what process mining delivers. It’s no longer a niche analytics tool, but an essential co-pilot for strategic financial leadership.

From Post-Mortem Audits to Proactive Assurance

For decades, risk management and compliance have operated on a cycle of retrospection and assumption. We conduct sample-based audits, find issues months after they occur, and then scramble to fix them.

However, in a world where a single compliance failure can result in millions of pounds in fines and irreparable reputational damage, this lag is a critical vulnerability. According to a recent study, organisations lose an estimated 5% of their revenue to fraud annually, often due to internal control weaknesses!

Process mining shifts the paradigm from reactive detection to continuous assurance.

By tapping directly into the event logs of your core systems (ERPs, CRMs, etc.), it reconstructs every single process as it actually happens, not as it has been drawn on a flowchart.

For instance, imagine being able to monitor 100% of your transactions for Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations in real-time. Instead of waiting for an auditor to discover that the same employee created a vendor and approved their invoice, you get an alert the moment it happens.

Process mining platforms doesn’t just flag the Policy Violation Rate. It also quantifies the value-at-risk for each deviation and pinpoints the root cause, whether it’s a system misconfiguration, a training gap, or intentional malpractice.

This transforms compliance from a periodic, manual checklist into a dynamic, automated, and always-on defence mechanism.

Turbocharging the Financial Close with Surgical Precision

The record-to-report (R2R) process, culminating in the month-end close, is the heartbeat of the finance function. Yet for many organisations, it’s a source of chronic pain characterised by a chaotic scramble of late journals, manual reconciliations, and intercompany breaks that extends the Days to Close and inflates the Manual Adjustment Rate

Traditional reporting might indicate that the close is delayed. However, it can’t tell you that 30% of the delay is caused by one specific team struggling with intercompany reconciliations in a newly acquired subsidiary.

Process mining provides this control tower or a birds-eye view. It dissects the entire R2R cycle with surgical precision, revealing the hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies that create friction, like:
Late & Back-Dated Journals: Instantly identify entries that bypass the closing calendar, pinpointing their origin and impact.

Intercompany Breaks: Flag mismatches the moment they occur and track Intercompany Difference Ageing, allowing teams to resolve high-value breaks before they stall consolidation.

Control Overrides: Surface every instance where standard approval workflows or authority limits were bypassed, turning hidden exceptions into transparent, data-backed facts.
By making the entire process transparent, you can transition from month-end hustle to a controlled, predictable, and ultimately faster close, paving the way for the strategic goal of a near-continuous financial close.
The Next Frontier: AI-Powered Finance and the Autonomous Enterprise

The true power of process mining is unlocked when it’s combined with AI and Machine Learning. This is where the finance function moves from diagnosis to prognosis and, eventually, to self-healing.
- Predictive Process Monitoring: The future isn’t just about seeing what went wrong; it’s about predicting what will go wrong. AI models trained on your process data can identify patterns that signal a future problem. For instance, the system could predict with 95% confidence that a specific high-value invoice will miss its payment deadline based on its initial attributes, allowing the accounts payable team to intervene proactively.
- Prescriptive Recommendations: The next logical step is for the system not only to predict a problem but also recommend or even automate the solution. Imagine the platform detecting a bottleneck in the approval workflow and automatically rerouting tasks to an available, authorised manager to keep the process moving. It is the foundation of the autonomous enterprise, where processes can dynamically adapt to changing conditions without human intervention.
- Conversational Intelligence: With the rise of Generative AI, we are stepping into an era where a CFO can simply ask their system about the primary driver of increase in rework during a certain quarter and flag the automation initiatives with the highest ROI. The system would respond not with a dashboard, but with a full root-cause analysis with data-backed recommendations.
This is the next logical evolution of financial management underpinned by process mining and AI. The organisations that embrace this will build a level of operational resilience and strategic agility that their competitors can only dream of matching!

For the modern CFO, whose role has expanded to that of a strategic partner and driver of enterprise-wide transformation, relying on outdated tools is akin to flying blind. Process mining provides the necessary instrumentation to visualise, understand, and optimise the intricate processes that underpin financial performance and corporate integrity

Harnessing this power requires more than just software. It demands a platform built for the complexities of modern finance, implemented by a team cross-skilled in the art of data science, enterprise applications, process automation and AI.

At FUTUROOT, we are such a team. Our mission is to provide the process intelligence that translates complex operational data into the clear, actionable insights CFOs need to navigate today’s challenges and build the resilient, autonomous finance function of tomorrow.
October 1, 2025
Why your CHRO and CFO Should Be Having the Process Mining Conversation Now
For: C-suite executives, CHROs, CFOs, and HR transformation leaders

The bottom line: HR inefficiencies contribute to $8.8 trillion in lost productivity globally¹, yet most organizations lack visibility into where the breakdown occurs.
Process mining solves the accountability gap between HR spending and business outcomes.

Here’s the conversation happening in boardrooms right now: CFOs want HR to prove ROI. CHROs can’t, because they’re managing processes they can’t see.

Companies where CFOs and CHROs collaborate on workforce planning report 20% higher productivity and 30% better budget predictability. Yet this partnership remains elusive at most organizations, not because of misalignment, but because HR operates without the operational transparency that finance considers baseline.

The result? HR remains a cost centre in the minds of boards and investors, despite managing the organization’s largest expense and most critical competitive asset

The Execution Problem No One Talks About

Your organization invested heavily in an ATS. You upgraded your HRMS. You launched a learning platform. The technology works. But can you answer these questions with data:
Why does it take 47 days to fill a mid-level role in one business unit and 89 days in another?

Which of your five recruitment agencies delivers candidates who stay past the
first year?

What percentage of your L&D budget connects to measurable performance
improvement?

Where exactly do high-potential candidates drop out of your hiring process?

Most CHROs answer these questions with anecdotes, averages, or educated guesses.
That’s not enough when operational inefficiencies cost businesses up to 30% of total
revenue and you’re being asked to defend every dollar of talent spend.
What Finance Sees That HR Doesn’t

CFOs view operations through process conformance, variance analysis, and exception reporting. They know immediately when invoice processing deviates from standard workflow or when procurement spend concentrates in unplanned categories.

HR lacks this operational rigor. You have KPIs—time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, engagement scores—but you don’t have process transparency. You know the average, but you can’t isolate the exceptions. You measure outcomes without understanding the mechanics that drive them.

This is where process mining creates strategic value. It applies the same analytical rigor that finance uses for spend management to the talent lifecycle. By analysing system logs from your HR tech stack, it reveals:
- Where processes break down: Not that hiring is slow, but that 60% of delays occur in a single approval step that could be redesigned
- Where money disappears: Not that training costs are high, but that 40% of registered employees never complete programs you’ve already paid for
- Where talent slips away: Not that candidate experience needs improvement, but that application abandonment spikes specifically after background checks take longer than seven days
This specificity transforms HR from “we need to do better” to “here’s exactly what to fix
and what it will yield.”

The Strategic Reset

The real opportunity isn’t operational efficiency—it’s strategic repositioning. When HR
can demonstrate the same process discipline as finance, three things happen:
- The budget conversation changes. Instead of defending headcount, you’re presenting data on how restructuring approval workflows will accelerate hiring by 23% and reduce agency spend by $2.3M annually. That’s a CFO conversation, not an HR conversation.
- The C-suite conversation changes. Organizations with business-integrated HR experience 40% lower turnover and 38% higher engagement. Process mining enables this integration by giving CHROs the operational command that earns them board-level strategic influence.
- The talent conversation changes. When you can show that specific process improvements directly impact employee experience and retention, talent strategy becomes inseparable from business strategy.
Why now?

Three factors make this urgent:
- First, 80% of organizations are doing more to balance HR costs than they were a year ago, but most are managing costs blindly. You need visibility before you need cuts.
- Second, the gap between HR technology investment and measurable business impact continues to widen. The tools exist. The data exists. The insights don’t, because no one is analysing how these systems operate end-to-end.
- Third, the CHRO role is under pressure. Those who demonstrate financial discipline and strategic impact survive. Those who can’t are increasingly seen as expendable. Process mining is the bridge to demonstrating both.
The Next Conversation

The question isn’t whether HR processes should operate with the same transparency as finance and operations. They should, and increasingly, they must.

The question is whether your organization will build this capability before or after you lose the next budget battle, before or after your best talent competitor demonstrates what data-driven HR actually delivers, and before or after your board questions why HR remains unable to connect workforce spending to business outcomes.

For CHROs and CFOs willing to have this conversation now, process mining offers a path to partnership—one where HR earns its seat at the strategy table not through lobbying, but through demonstrating the operational excellence and strategic discipline that defines every other function at that table.

What to do: If your HR function can’t answer “why” and “where” questions about process performance with data, start with a diagnostic. Map your three highest-cost talent processes end-to-end. Measure variation. Find the breakdowns. That’s where value hides.

FUTUROOT delivers Process Mining as a Service (PMaaS) purpose-built for HR functions. We help CHROs and CFOs establish the operational transparency needed to transform HR from cost centre to strategic asset—with AI-powered analytics that reveal exactly where processes break down, where budgets leak, and where talent experience suffers. Connect with us to close the execution gap between your HR strategy and measurable business outcomes.
1. ↩︎
July 5, 2025
Process Mining: A Necessity for Modern Banking
The Modern Chief Financial Officer is Navigating a Perfect Storm.

Geopolitical instability is disrupting supply chains, persistent inflation is eroding margins, and a complex web of regulations, from ESG reporting to new data privacy laws, creates a minefield of business risk. In this environment, the traditional tools, like spreadsheets and business intelligence (BI) dashboards, are no longer enough.

These tools are like a car’s rearview mirror. They tell you that margins dropped last quarter or that audit findings spiked. But they can’t tell you why. They can’t show you the traffic jam building up ahead.

To navigate today’s landscape, CFOs need a windshield, a forward-looking, real-time view into the operational DNA of the business. This is precisely what process mining delivers. It’s no longer a niche analytics tool, but an essential co-pilot for strategic financial leadership.

From Post-Mortem Audits to Proactive Assurance

For decades, risk management and compliance have operated on a cycle of retrospection and assumption. We conduct sample-based audits, find issues months after they occur, and then scramble to fix them.

However, in a world where a single compliance failure can result in millions of pounds in fines and irreparable reputational damage, this lag is a critical vulnerability. According to a recent study, organisations lose an estimated 5% of their revenue to fraud annually, often due to internal control weaknesses!

Process mining shifts the paradigm from reactive detection to continuous assurance.

By tapping directly into the event logs of your core systems (ERPs, CRMs, etc.), it reconstructs every single process as it actually happens, not as it has been drawn on a flowchart.

For instance, imagine being able to monitor 100% of your transactions for Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations in real-time. Instead of waiting for an auditor to discover that the same employee created a vendor and approved their invoice, you get an alert the moment it happens.

Process mining platforms doesn’t just flag the Policy Violation Rate. It also quantifies the value-at-risk for each deviation and pinpoints the root cause, whether it’s a system misconfiguration, a training gap, or intentional malpractice.

This transforms compliance from a periodic, manual checklist into a dynamic, automated, and always-on defence mechanism.

Turbocharging the Financial Close with Surgical Precision

The record-to-report (R2R) process, culminating in the month-end close, is the heartbeat of the finance function. Yet for many organisations, it’s a source of chronic pain characterised by a chaotic scramble of late journals, manual reconciliations, and intercompany breaks that extends the Days to Close and inflates the Manual Adjustment Rate

Traditional reporting might indicate that the close is delayed. However, it can’t tell you that 30% of the delay is caused by one specific team struggling with intercompany reconciliations in a newly acquired subsidiary.

Process mining provides this control tower or a birds-eye view. It dissects the entire R2R cycle with surgical precision, revealing the hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies that create friction, like:
Late & Back-Dated Journals: Instantly identify entries that bypass the closing calendar, pinpointing their origin and impact.

Intercompany Breaks: Flag mismatches the moment they occur and track Intercompany Difference Ageing, allowing teams to resolve high-value breaks before they stall consolidation.

Control Overrides: Surface every instance where standard approval workflows or authority limits were bypassed, turning hidden exceptions into transparent, data-backed facts.
By making the entire process transparent, you can transition from month-end hustle to a controlled, predictable, and ultimately faster close, paving the way for the strategic goal of a near-continuous financial close.
The Next Frontier: AI-Powered Finance and the Autonomous Enterprise

The true power of process mining is unlocked when it’s combined with AI and Machine Learning. This is where the finance function moves from diagnosis to prognosis and, eventually, to self-healing.
- Predictive Process Monitoring: The future isn’t just about seeing what went wrong; it’s about predicting what will go wrong. AI models trained on your process data can identify patterns that signal a future problem. For instance, the system could predict with 95% confidence that a specific high-value invoice will miss its payment deadline based on its initial attributes, allowing the accounts payable team to intervene proactively.
- Prescriptive Recommendations: The next logical step is for the system not only to predict a problem but also recommend or even automate the solution. Imagine the platform detecting a bottleneck in the approval workflow and automatically rerouting tasks to an available, authorised manager to keep the process moving. It is the foundation of the autonomous enterprise, where processes can dynamically adapt to changing conditions without human intervention.
- Conversational Intelligence: With the rise of Generative AI, we are stepping into an era where a CFO can simply ask their system about the primary driver of increase in rework during a certain quarter and flag the automation initiatives with the highest ROI. The system would respond not with a dashboard, but with a full root-cause analysis with data-backed recommendations.
This is the next logical evolution of financial management underpinned by process mining and AI. The organisations that embrace this will build a level of operational resilience and strategic agility that their competitors can only dream of matching!

For the modern CFO, whose role has expanded to that of a strategic partner and driver of enterprise-wide transformation, relying on outdated tools is akin to flying blind. Process mining provides the necessary instrumentation to visualise, understand, and optimise the intricate processes that underpin financial performance and corporate integrity

Harnessing this power requires more than just software. It demands a platform built for the complexities of modern finance, implemented by a team cross-skilled in the art of data science, enterprise applications, process automation and AI.

At FUTUROOT, we are such a team. Our mission is to provide the process intelligence that translates complex operational data into the clear, actionable insights CFOs need to navigate today’s challenges and build the resilient, autonomous finance function of tomorrow.
June 8, 2025
The Impact of Process Mining Across Different Industries
The Modern Chief Financial Officer is Navigating a Perfect Storm.

Geopolitical instability is disrupting supply chains, persistent inflation is eroding margins, and a complex web of regulations, from ESG reporting to new data privacy laws, creates a minefield of business risk. In this environment, the traditional tools, like spreadsheets and business intelligence (BI) dashboards, are no longer enough.

These tools are like a car’s rearview mirror. They tell you that margins dropped last quarter or that audit findings spiked. But they can’t tell you why. They can’t show you the traffic jam building up ahead.

To navigate today’s landscape, CFOs need a windshield, a forward-looking, real-time view into the operational DNA of the business. This is precisely what process mining delivers. It’s no longer a niche analytics tool, but an essential co-pilot for strategic financial leadership.

From Post-Mortem Audits to Proactive Assurance

For decades, risk management and compliance have operated on a cycle of retrospection and assumption. We conduct sample-based audits, find issues months after they occur, and then scramble to fix them.

However, in a world where a single compliance failure can result in millions of pounds in fines and irreparable reputational damage, this lag is a critical vulnerability. According to a recent study, organisations lose an estimated 5% of their revenue to fraud annually, often due to internal control weaknesses!

Process mining shifts the paradigm from reactive detection to continuous assurance.

By tapping directly into the event logs of your core systems (ERPs, CRMs, etc.), it reconstructs every single process as it actually happens, not as it has been drawn on a flowchart.

For instance, imagine being able to monitor 100% of your transactions for Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations in real-time. Instead of waiting for an auditor to discover that the same employee created a vendor and approved their invoice, you get an alert the moment it happens.

Process mining platforms doesn’t just flag the Policy Violation Rate. It also quantifies the value-at-risk for each deviation and pinpoints the root cause, whether it’s a system misconfiguration, a training gap, or intentional malpractice.

This transforms compliance from a periodic, manual checklist into a dynamic, automated, and always-on defence mechanism.

Turbocharging the Financial Close with Surgical Precision

The record-to-report (R2R) process, culminating in the month-end close, is the heartbeat of the finance function. Yet for many organisations, it’s a source of chronic pain characterised by a chaotic scramble of late journals, manual reconciliations, and intercompany breaks that extends the Days to Close and inflates the Manual Adjustment Rate

Traditional reporting might indicate that the close is delayed. However, it can’t tell you that 30% of the delay is caused by one specific team struggling with intercompany reconciliations in a newly acquired subsidiary.

Process mining provides this control tower or a birds-eye view. It dissects the entire R2R cycle with surgical precision, revealing the hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies that create friction, like:
Late & Back-Dated Journals: Instantly identify entries that bypass the closing calendar, pinpointing their origin and impact.

Intercompany Breaks: Flag mismatches the moment they occur and track Intercompany Difference Ageing, allowing teams to resolve high-value breaks before they stall consolidation.

Control Overrides: Surface every instance where standard approval workflows or authority limits were bypassed, turning hidden exceptions into transparent, data-backed facts.
By making the entire process transparent, you can transition from month-end hustle to a controlled, predictable, and ultimately faster close, paving the way for the strategic goal of a near-continuous financial close.
The Next Frontier: AI-Powered Finance and the Autonomous Enterprise

The true power of process mining is unlocked when it’s combined with AI and Machine Learning. This is where the finance function moves from diagnosis to prognosis and, eventually, to self-healing.
- Predictive Process Monitoring: The future isn’t just about seeing what went wrong; it’s about predicting what will go wrong. AI models trained on your process data can identify patterns that signal a future problem. For instance, the system could predict with 95% confidence that a specific high-value invoice will miss its payment deadline based on its initial attributes, allowing the accounts payable team to intervene proactively.
- Prescriptive Recommendations: The next logical step is for the system not only to predict a problem but also recommend or even automate the solution. Imagine the platform detecting a bottleneck in the approval workflow and automatically rerouting tasks to an available, authorised manager to keep the process moving. It is the foundation of the autonomous enterprise, where processes can dynamically adapt to changing conditions without human intervention.
- Conversational Intelligence: With the rise of Generative AI, we are stepping into an era where a CFO can simply ask their system about the primary driver of increase in rework during a certain quarter and flag the automation initiatives with the highest ROI. The system would respond not with a dashboard, but with a full root-cause analysis with data-backed recommendations.
This is the next logical evolution of financial management underpinned by process mining and AI. The organisations that embrace this will build a level of operational resilience and strategic agility that their competitors can only dream of matching!

For the modern CFO, whose role has expanded to that of a strategic partner and driver of enterprise-wide transformation, relying on outdated tools is akin to flying blind. Process mining provides the necessary instrumentation to visualise, understand, and optimise the intricate processes that underpin financial performance and corporate integrity

Harnessing this power requires more than just software. It demands a platform built for the complexities of modern finance, implemented by a team cross-skilled in the art of data science, enterprise applications, process automation and AI.

At FUTUROOT, we are such a team. Our mission is to provide the process intelligence that translates complex operational data into the clear, actionable insights CFOs need to navigate today’s challenges and build the resilient, autonomous finance function of tomorrow.
May 10, 2025
Try NowKey Insights from ICPM 2024 – A Paradigm Shift in Digital Transformation
The Modern Chief Financial Officer is Navigating a Perfect Storm.

Geopolitical instability is disrupting supply chains, persistent inflation is eroding margins, and a complex web of regulations, from ESG reporting to new data privacy laws, creates a minefield of business risk. In this environment, the traditional tools, like spreadsheets and business intelligence (BI) dashboards, are no longer enough.

These tools are like a car’s rearview mirror. They tell you that margins dropped last quarter or that audit findings spiked. But they can’t tell you why. They can’t show you the traffic jam building up ahead.

To navigate today’s landscape, CFOs need a windshield, a forward-looking, real-time view into the operational DNA of the business. This is precisely what process mining delivers. It’s no longer a niche analytics tool, but an essential co-pilot for strategic financial leadership.

From Post-Mortem Audits to Proactive Assurance

For decades, risk management and compliance have operated on a cycle of retrospection and assumption. We conduct sample-based audits, find issues months after they occur, and then scramble to fix them.

However, in a world where a single compliance failure can result in millions of pounds in fines and irreparable reputational damage, this lag is a critical vulnerability. According to a recent study, organisations lose an estimated 5% of their revenue to fraud annually, often due to internal control weaknesses!

Process mining shifts the paradigm from reactive detection to continuous assurance.

By tapping directly into the event logs of your core systems (ERPs, CRMs, etc.), it reconstructs every single process as it actually happens, not as it has been drawn on a flowchart.

For instance, imagine being able to monitor 100% of your transactions for Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations in real-time. Instead of waiting for an auditor to discover that the same employee created a vendor and approved their invoice, you get an alert the moment it happens.

Process mining platforms doesn’t just flag the Policy Violation Rate. It also quantifies the value-at-risk for each deviation and pinpoints the root cause, whether it’s a system misconfiguration, a training gap, or intentional malpractice.

This transforms compliance from a periodic, manual checklist into a dynamic, automated, and always-on defence mechanism.

Turbocharging the Financial Close with Surgical Precision

The record-to-report (R2R) process, culminating in the month-end close, is the heartbeat of the finance function. Yet for many organisations, it’s a source of chronic pain characterised by a chaotic scramble of late journals, manual reconciliations, and intercompany breaks that extends the Days to Close and inflates the Manual Adjustment Rate

Traditional reporting might indicate that the close is delayed. However, it can’t tell you that 30% of the delay is caused by one specific team struggling with intercompany reconciliations in a newly acquired subsidiary.

Process mining provides this control tower or a birds-eye view. It dissects the entire R2R cycle with surgical precision, revealing the hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies that create friction, like:
Late & Back-Dated Journals: Instantly identify entries that bypass the closing calendar, pinpointing their origin and impact.

Intercompany Breaks: Flag mismatches the moment they occur and track Intercompany Difference Ageing, allowing teams to resolve high-value breaks before they stall consolidation.

Control Overrides: Surface every instance where standard approval workflows or authority limits were bypassed, turning hidden exceptions into transparent, data-backed facts.
By making the entire process transparent, you can transition from month-end hustle to a controlled, predictable, and ultimately faster close, paving the way for the strategic goal of a near-continuous financial close.
The Next Frontier: AI-Powered Finance and the Autonomous Enterprise

The true power of process mining is unlocked when it’s combined with AI and Machine Learning. This is where the finance function moves from diagnosis to prognosis and, eventually, to self-healing.
- Predictive Process Monitoring: The future isn’t just about seeing what went wrong; it’s about predicting what will go wrong. AI models trained on your process data can identify patterns that signal a future problem. For instance, the system could predict with 95% confidence that a specific high-value invoice will miss its payment deadline based on its initial attributes, allowing the accounts payable team to intervene proactively.
- Prescriptive Recommendations: The next logical step is for the system not only to predict a problem but also recommend or even automate the solution. Imagine the platform detecting a bottleneck in the approval workflow and automatically rerouting tasks to an available, authorised manager to keep the process moving. It is the foundation of the autonomous enterprise, where processes can dynamically adapt to changing conditions without human intervention.
- Conversational Intelligence: With the rise of Generative AI, we are stepping into an era where a CFO can simply ask their system about the primary driver of increase in rework during a certain quarter and flag the automation initiatives with the highest ROI. The system would respond not with a dashboard, but with a full root-cause analysis with data-backed recommendations.
This is the next logical evolution of financial management underpinned by process mining and AI. The organisations that embrace this will build a level of operational resilience and strategic agility that their competitors can only dream of matching!

For the modern CFO, whose role has expanded to that of a strategic partner and driver of enterprise-wide transformation, relying on outdated tools is akin to flying blind. Process mining provides the necessary instrumentation to visualise, understand, and optimise the intricate processes that underpin financial performance and corporate integrity

Harnessing this power requires more than just software. It demands a platform built for the complexities of modern finance, implemented by a team cross-skilled in the art of data science, enterprise applications, process automation and AI.

At FUTUROOT, we are such a team. Our mission is to provide the process intelligence that translates complex operational data into the clear, actionable insights CFOs need to navigate today’s challenges and build the resilient, autonomous finance function of tomorrow.
November 15, 2024
Key Insights from ICPM 2024 – A Paradigm Shift in Digital Transformation
The Modern Chief Financial Officer is Navigating a Perfect Storm.

Geopolitical instability is disrupting supply chains, persistent inflation is eroding margins, and a complex web of regulations, from ESG reporting to new data privacy laws, creates a minefield of business risk. In this environment, the traditional tools, like spreadsheets and business intelligence (BI) dashboards, are no longer enough.

These tools are like a car’s rearview mirror. They tell you that margins dropped last quarter or that audit findings spiked. But they can’t tell you why. They can’t show you the traffic jam building up ahead.

To navigate today’s landscape, CFOs need a windshield, a forward-looking, real-time view into the operational DNA of the business. This is precisely what process mining delivers. It’s no longer a niche analytics tool, but an essential co-pilot for strategic financial leadership.

From Post-Mortem Audits to Proactive Assurance

For decades, risk management and compliance have operated on a cycle of retrospection and assumption. We conduct sample-based audits, find issues months after they occur, and then scramble to fix them.

However, in a world where a single compliance failure can result in millions of pounds in fines and irreparable reputational damage, this lag is a critical vulnerability. According to a recent study, organisations lose an estimated 5% of their revenue to fraud annually, often due to internal control weaknesses!

Process mining shifts the paradigm from reactive detection to continuous assurance.

By tapping directly into the event logs of your core systems (ERPs, CRMs, etc.), it reconstructs every single process as it actually happens, not as it has been drawn on a flowchart.

For instance, imagine being able to monitor 100% of your transactions for Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations in real-time. Instead of waiting for an auditor to discover that the same employee created a vendor and approved their invoice, you get an alert the moment it happens.

Process mining platforms doesn’t just flag the Policy Violation Rate. It also quantifies the value-at-risk for each deviation and pinpoints the root cause, whether it’s a system misconfiguration, a training gap, or intentional malpractice.

This transforms compliance from a periodic, manual checklist into a dynamic, automated, and always-on defence mechanism.

Turbocharging the Financial Close with Surgical Precision

The record-to-report (R2R) process, culminating in the month-end close, is the heartbeat of the finance function. Yet for many organisations, it’s a source of chronic pain characterised by a chaotic scramble of late journals, manual reconciliations, and intercompany breaks that extends the Days to Close and inflates the Manual Adjustment Rate

Traditional reporting might indicate that the close is delayed. However, it can’t tell you that 30% of the delay is caused by one specific team struggling with intercompany reconciliations in a newly acquired subsidiary.

Process mining provides this control tower or a birds-eye view. It dissects the entire R2R cycle with surgical precision, revealing the hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies that create friction, like:
Late & Back-Dated Journals: Instantly identify entries that bypass the closing calendar, pinpointing their origin and impact.

Intercompany Breaks: Flag mismatches the moment they occur and track Intercompany Difference Ageing, allowing teams to resolve high-value breaks before they stall consolidation.

Control Overrides: Surface every instance where standard approval workflows or authority limits were bypassed, turning hidden exceptions into transparent, data-backed facts.
By making the entire process transparent, you can transition from month-end hustle to a controlled, predictable, and ultimately faster close, paving the way for the strategic goal of a near-continuous financial close.
The Next Frontier: AI-Powered Finance and the Autonomous Enterprise

The true power of process mining is unlocked when it’s combined with AI and Machine Learning. This is where the finance function moves from diagnosis to prognosis and, eventually, to self-healing.
- Predictive Process Monitoring: The future isn’t just about seeing what went wrong; it’s about predicting what will go wrong. AI models trained on your process data can identify patterns that signal a future problem. For instance, the system could predict with 95% confidence that a specific high-value invoice will miss its payment deadline based on its initial attributes, allowing the accounts payable team to intervene proactively.
- Prescriptive Recommendations: The next logical step is for the system not only to predict a problem but also recommend or even automate the solution. Imagine the platform detecting a bottleneck in the approval workflow and automatically rerouting tasks to an available, authorised manager to keep the process moving. It is the foundation of the autonomous enterprise, where processes can dynamically adapt to changing conditions without human intervention.
- Conversational Intelligence: With the rise of Generative AI, we are stepping into an era where a CFO can simply ask their system about the primary driver of increase in rework during a certain quarter and flag the automation initiatives with the highest ROI. The system would respond not with a dashboard, but with a full root-cause analysis with data-backed recommendations.
This is the next logical evolution of financial management underpinned by process mining and AI. The organisations that embrace this will build a level of operational resilience and strategic agility that their competitors can only dream of matching!

For the modern CFO, whose role has expanded to that of a strategic partner and driver of enterprise-wide transformation, relying on outdated tools is akin to flying blind. Process mining provides the necessary instrumentation to visualise, understand, and optimise the intricate processes that underpin financial performance and corporate integrity

Harnessing this power requires more than just software. It demands a platform built for the complexities of modern finance, implemented by a team cross-skilled in the art of data science, enterprise applications, process automation and AI.

At FUTUROOT, we are such a team. Our mission is to provide the process intelligence that translates complex operational data into the clear, actionable insights CFOs need to navigate today’s challenges and build the resilient, autonomous finance function of tomorrow.
November 13, 2024