Q&A: Juergen Ott, Allianz

Steve Dunkerley: How do you define ‘effectiveness?’

Juergen Ott: Effectiveness is the continuous ability of a finance organisation to provide reliable and relevant information at the time it is needed. The prerequisite is some investment into it, for example attracting highly professional people, committed to going the extra mile to find a solution or fix a problem. You need to empower them and to further develop their entrepreneurial spirit. And you need to give them the right tools at hand. Nothing is more frustrating for good accountants, cost controllers or risk managers than a choppy infrastructure when they need to deliver fast and high quality information.

SD: Why is taking an end-to-end approach to the finance function important and how has this approach helped your company?

JO: An end-to-end perspective is indispensable to guarantee the quality and correctness of information. It’s like the old saying: garbage in, garbage out. Only if you’re able to track your information, if you are in a position to control the flow of data from the very beginning toward the final report, can you truly rely on the information you use for decision making. It’s the same from an IT perspective. If you are able to standardise your master data – the granularity and dimensionality of your reporting content not only alongside the value chain of your finance function but from the point of first data entry onwards – it’s just a matter of transactional data processing through your IT systems. The main problem today is, I assume, that a lot of finance organisations out there still do not know whether they want go that way and even if this is clarified it’s still a lot of work to harmonise or even standardise the master data across their systems and to continuously keep the discipline up.

SD: How do you drive process improvements within your company?

JO: Process improvements are driven from a functional view with a focus on effectiveness and efficiency (in that sequence) and adaptions are strictly limited to the functionality a standard software gives you. We adopted this new paradigm simply because we were tired of paying twice; first for software licences to an external provider and then a second time by configuring the software internally to satisfy the (frequent nice-to-have) wishes of any end-user.

SD: To what extent do you utilise internal or external consultants to examine, diagnose and prescribe process change?

JO: The use of external consultants has been reduced quite significantly over the past few years to save costs, and because we’ve built up our own expertise in many areas. Still, for innovations we cooperate with externals just to leverage their profound and up-to-date knowledge but it’s always case oriented.

SD: How useful is benchmarking and the approach you take to it to achieve process improvements?

JO: In terms of benchmarking, it’s a tricky thing. On the one hand I support benchmarking as a way of instilling a competitive spirit within our finance function. We benchmark performance in the areas of cost efficiency, process efficiency within our subsidiaries and their competitors (market by market) and gather this data ourselves or via the use of thirdparty (professional) benchmark data providers. Having accumulated and analysed the data, we then let all our entities know the results to stimulate them to become better.

On the other hand, once you have done so for quite some time and you dig deeper into the cause-effect analysis, you’ll figure out that you really can’t compare one to each other, because everyone works in different consumer environments, legal environments, you name it. So, ultimately you compare different business models against each other, and decision makers then tend to lose interest in this kind of exercise, which is understandable. It’s therefore of temporary advantage.