Sustainable Finance: Ashwani Narang’s Insights At BW CFO Summit 2024
During keynote session of BW CFO World Finance Leadership & Strategy Summit 2024 + BW CFO World Best CFO & Finance Strategy Awards Agenda, Ashwani Narang, Head of Spend Management, SAP India, expressed his views on the topic “Future-proofing your business with an Intelligent Spend Management solution”.
Narang stresses the importance of staying connected with suppliers and service providers. He says, “If you’re not connecting with your suppliers, there’s a big gap between you and them.” He emphasises that even small actions, like reducing paper usage or choosing sustainable products, can make a big difference. “How many trees did you save today?” he asks, urging listeners to think about their daily impact on the environment.
He says “I printed more papers or sent more emails which I could have ignored , or may be I have purchased more goods which are not recyclable or buying products that are not sustainable that’s how I’m looking at it personally I Am adding ESG goals for myself and finally building a responsive workforce where most of the questions get answered”.“Skill management is becoming a big problem for the companies today. Ask any CFO today if you want to hire somebody in your company to buy packaging material for the company and if we go to the colleges how many people do you think can do this job?” He added
When you look at all of this together it goes beyond the boundaries of buying anything where you are spending in the organisation, you can’t now only talk about direct materials or indirect material, workforce, your travelling expenses or supply chain finances, it goes much beyond that and when we talk about this an important question comes from a lot of companies where they tell us that , we have a fair enough system that does something and this system is good enough to run my operations and that’s what we lose having good enough systems and probably the best in class.
Around 105 billion dollars which was lost because violation of travel policy was done, are we taking it’s seriously, there are around 25 percent of organisations considers that they are equipped enough to handle supply chain crisis ,we are currently going through supply chain shock, we saw Brooklyn Bridge which happened recently , costed 6 billion dollars in a single event. There is around 44 percent of spend which is only covered in the form of spend category. Today Cfo’s are giving targets to their teams to spend a particular amount. I believe it constantly rises and if you have not given it, let me tell you we are living by chance.
