CFO focus
Years in the making Another key contributor is Knudsen’s commitment to his company. Speaking to him for just a few minutes, it’s impossible to ignore his passion for Novo Nordisk, battling to deliver a better quality of life to millions. As Knudsen puts it, his company “drives change to defeat diabetes and other serious chronic diseases”.
That focus on diabetes is no accident. With a rich history spanning almost 100 years, Novo has been a leading light in the global battle against the illness, having commercialised the production of insulin in 1923. Among other therapeutic areas, the company today provides around half of the global supply of insulin, treating more than 32 million patients.
Knudsen, for his part, started his time with Novo as a business analyst at the company’s NNIT A/S subsidiary in 1999, and has climbed the ranks to CFO. “The role of the CFO, and of the entire finance function, has significantly changed because technology has matured,” he says. Reflecting back on his early career, he adds that finance was a function that took data from one system and input it in another – and was largely based on Excel. Nowadays, however, things have changed dramatically. “The finance function is much smarter and rewarding, in the sense that it’s more about using data to create value for the corporation, rather than cranking a process,” Knudsen says. This has enabled finance professionals to operate in what he describes as a much more qualified way than they ever have before. Data, and a maturing understanding of how it can be utilised, is key to the value creation across businesses, not just in finance, and will ultimately benefit patients, shareholders and other stakeholders.
Data: the next frontier for CFOs It’s a vision Knudsen has for Novo and pharma more widely, but it’s not exclusive to his company. Professional services provider Deloitte says “it’s crunch time” for finance departments. It predicts that by the middle of this decade, the profession will have gone through a major transition, one it says is already under way, adding that now is the time to prepare for “the inevitable disruption ahead”.
In its ‘Finance 2025’ report, Deloitte shared its eight predictions for CFOs. Among others, it said the finance function would change, reporting would become real-time, traditional enterprise resource planning would be challenged and data management would become even more important. Knudsen says he’s already feeling the tectonic plates shift. The transactional side of finance is getting less significant, he believes, thanks to data and more optimised decision making.
On a broader level, he continues, Novo Nordisk has firmly put digital transformation at the heart of
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
its future through its digital strategy. In practice, that means using data to provide insights that will have “real impacts” on how business is done. Supporting this are initiatives aimed at attracting some of the brightest new talent in the fields of data management and analytics, integrations, cloud and infrastructure, and global platforms, as the multinational transitions in a way it hopes will fundamentally change the development, production and delivery of its therapeutics.
Running like a river through all this, says Knudsen, is the clever use of data. “If you talk to any of my colleagues in the executive suite, digital is a keeper,” he explains. “From using it in research or connected clinical trials, to manufacturing, to digital finance functions, it’s truly key. It has a clear efficiency aspect, but also an effectiveness aspect too: that could be reducing waste, for example.”
Going digital With more than 35,000 participants in clinical trials across 50 countries annually, countless external partners and an abundance of research projects taking place in numerous locations, Novo Nordisk is producing vast amounts of data. And, as Deloitte warns, data is only as good as the management of it is – something Knudsen clearly understands. As he puts it: “Being able to utilise data in a much more enriched way, thereby designing future research and clinical trials in a smarter way, will help generate better outcomes for patients and better pharmaceutical products too.”
Advances like these will ultimately indirectly benefit the commercial capabilities of an organisation too, in whatever industry. This is why the role of the CFO and their teams is evolving more quickly than it ever has before. Today’s CFOs, after all, are far more public than their predecessors, as they’re now tasked with driving change enterprise-wide. Apart from expanding the to-do list for CFOs the world over, that’s also
Karsten Munk Knudsen is confident that data will transform the way Novo Nordisk operates, and not just on the finance side.
39% 9
The percentage of Novo Nordisk’s global workforce based in its home country of Denmark.
The number of countries with Novo Nordisk production centres: Algeria, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Japan, Russia, the UK and US.
5
The number of countries hosting Novo Nordisk R&D centres: China, Denmark, India, the UK and US.
Novo Nordisk 15
Novo Nordisk
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