Unum Finance Chief Stresses Importance of Advocating for Digital Transformation

Chief Financial Officer

Steve Zabel

talks about how the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based mostly corporation acquired rid of spreadsheets, what he would like task candidates to bring and why finance chiefs play an important part in advertising automation attempts. This is the fifth element of a series that focuses on how CFOs and other executives digitize their finance functions. Edited excerpts adhere to.

WSJ: What are the key actions you took as a business to modernize your finance perform?

Mr. Zabel: The initial move we took was all-around some of our actuarial income stream versions. We employ those to do pricing and forecasting and seriously every thing all over [financial performance]. We began that back in 2013 and we’ve now cycled through all of our items and bought [them] on a reliable platform. Then, in 2017, we applied two issues which ended up genuinely valuable. We introduced in a new general ledger and we put in a [configurable reporting technology]. We do all of our money reporting off of that.

What that authorized us to do is at the corporate amount get rid of all the consolidation, all the spreadsheets. Stage two has been to now appear at the accounting processes that we have and commence to apply extra unique automation technological innovation.

WSJ: What are your important goals?

Mr. Zabel: There is a several points, [including] the quality of the do the job that our people today are executing. It’s them [having to] spend significantly less time compiling information and facts for the purpose of generating journal entries and also compiling facts just to do standard reporting. So shifting them from that type of function to more analysis and performing with our merchandise lines. It is a pretty competitive atmosphere for expertise. What ever we can do to make it a additional satisfying encounter for personnel is heading to help us in the extensive run.

WSJ: Is there an estimate how a great deal time your personnel save with these new technologies?

Mr. Zabel: I have a large amount of functional locations underneath me and some of them are extra focused on the true economical reporting and journal entries than some of the others. On regular, individuals places almost certainly invested 70% to 80% of their time just finding the transactions accomplished and then acquiring the info back out of the ledger to be able to assess [them]. We have now moved that additional toward 50/50. What we’d like to do is absolutely flip that [to] in which they only commit maybe 20% of their time really processing transactions.

WSJ: How are you serving to them do that?

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

WSJ: What’s remaining to be carried out ahead of you hit the 20% concentrate on?

Mr. Zabel: There is a couple parts that we still need to function on. One particular is facts. Any time you begin a electronic transformation, it all begins with the knowledge you have. Some of our details is in seriously excellent shape. [For] some of it, we however have some operate to do. So I assume there is some foundational locations wherever the facts requires to be in a greater variety, but then it’s just creating the bandwidth for our teams to educate themselves on the resources and make the capacity for them to be equipped to use them.

WSJ: What is your head count in finance, and do you be expecting it to shrink as you automate even more?

Mr. Zabel: We have just more than 500 persons ideal now in the finance business, out of a complete staff foundation of around 10,000. What we’re seriously attempting to do with driving efficiencies is not so a great deal get head depend out, it is additional about redeploying those methods to resolving extra enterprise concerns for our organization companions. I have no plans to minimize head depend within just the firm. I would relatively commit individuals sources and redeploy them to assistance the firm develop in various means.

WSJ: What are you on the lookout for when you assess possible candidates?

Mr. Zabel: It’s really essential that we have folks that have a excellent technological foundation. We have a ton of formally trained accountants and actuaries inside the corporation. We also have people that have a accurate data science track record. Going forward, what we’ll need to have additional of are men and women that can translate company procedures into [automation opportunities]. [For] a lot of the applications that are available now you do not genuinely have to be that tech enabled in your official qualifications. They’re quite configurable.

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

Mr. Zabel: You definitely have to be an advocate for it. Having the option when you can to highlight and accept when we have all those “ring the bell” times wherever men and women have utilized technological innovation to enhance their business processes is genuinely significant. I consider the other detail is just staying plugged into what we’re carrying out with our electronic tactic extra broadly. I’m tied at the hip with the human being that runs our [information technology] section and also our electronic transform agenda.

Compose to Nina Trentmann at [email protected]