CFO focus
Right: The Leadenhall Building, London, featuring a suite of Kone panoramic elevators.
Far right: The Kone Lane digital access gate system, which won the Red Dot Design Award.
Below: With a history dating back to 1910, Kone means ‘machine’ in Finnish.
Previous page: Ikka Hara, CFO at Kone.
digitalisation when it comes to finance especially. Examine the CFO’s CV, and this makes sense. Hara has been on the cutting edge of the digital transformation of finance for years, having worked at Microsoft and Nokia, as well as at some of the world’s leading investment banks, before finally joining Kone in 2016.
This long apprenticeship has helped give Hara a robust sense of his role as a financial director – especially when it comes to his own competencies. As Hara puts it, there are three areas where harvested data can have a real impact: the work the finance team does; how it supports others to find efficiencies and better operational processes; and how customer data can help Kone better meet customer needs.
200,000
The number of people worldwide who move to a city every day. That equates to 140 a minute.
UN
analysed. Once that’s known, Kone says, it can tailor solutions to meet the individual needs of a customer, their buildings and the people using them. It’s certainly an interesting proposition. If you can understand what’s happening within a customer’s environment, after all, you can presumably make decisions that help your bottom line too. In fact, the information is so valuable that Kone regularly shares the data with investors, giving them an insight into how the company is performing, as well as the areas it can develop over the years ahead.
A data democracy Kone is similarly enthusiastic about using data and
“From a finance perspective,” Hara argues, “[digitisation] has meant that many of us have had to learn more about how to use data, how to drive decision-making everywhere in the company, and how to be more data-based.” Of course, none of this is new. But using this vast resource to better inform financial and, subsequently, operational decision-making among what Hara calls “business partners”, is an increasingly critical objective. He says it’s about connecting the data dots in a way that all sides of the business can benefit. “So, how to reach out and really provide the insights that help all of us make better decisions on a day-to-day basis?” Hara asks. “That is the key challenge we face in finance.”
One example is the thousands of technicians Kone has around the world, all maintaining or installing elevators, each with connected handheld devices that collect vast amounts of data – although personal data is assiduously omitted. That data is interpreted to enhance their operations, benefiting the business, technicians on the ground – and even customers they service. Describing this shift as a key development, Hara explains that this kind of data connectivity can equally be used by his financial team. “I think one of the core competencies, and things we need to get right, is forecasting,” he says. “How can you use data, and new technologies to be more efficient, and more accurate? I think all of these come together as a holistic enterprise.” That all-inclusive approach means every function, from any part of the business, can inform another.
14 Finance Director Europe /
www.financedirectoreurope.com
KONE
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