Digital contribution focuses on delivering results through e-commerce/d-commerce solutions and/or leveraging digital skills such as Automation, Design Thinking, Data & Analytics, and Agile approach.
From all my business roles I gained a good understanding where digital solutions and especially data analytics would really help us.
The functional knowledge I gained from our digital centric associates in IA. They provided great training on SQL, Tableau and Power BI.
Focus. Instead of going digital anywhere, it is important to first understanding where the biggest painpoints lie and where we have the highest repetitiveness.
Define what “data literate” means for myself as the leader of the team vs. my associates. We like to use buzz words without being clear on what they actually mean.
We are wasting less time on getting data and are spending it to generate insights to the business and to put a number behind a risk or opportunity. Our stakeholders also appreciate the powerful visuals from Tableau or Power BI which tell the story in a more effective way.
Given big focus on digital, we have dedicated groups of experts inside Internal Audit Team and inside the local S&F Community who help accelerating digital transformation and improving data analytical skills of associates. During this year they provided multiple trainings on digital tools, programming languages and data literacy. And, of course, knowledge gained at trainings is reinforced through practice, e.g. creating Tableau dashboards to analyze big data or writing macro to ease audit report formatting.
Digital world is developing at high speed, so there is always something new to learn. Don’t stick to the status quo, learn more about digital, challenge yourself and you will find many opportunities to simplify routine tasks and do your job in a more efficient way.
The biggest challenge is probably to find the time for education and implementation of digital skills in the daily work. When you start doing something for the first time (e.g. creating a dashboard from scratch or writing your first code) you have to invest additional time to learn and try, but such investment will pay off by increasing your efficiency and releasing your time afterwards. Therefore, try to find some time in your schedule and book timeslots for education and also add some extra time to your daily operations to practice some digital skills.
I was amazed by the way data analytics and data visualization can ease insights reporting! Just one chart can replace several paragraphs of text and make insights more powerful. Just one dashboard can replace several files with excel calculations and make figures more clear for the stakeholders. The more you incorporate digital component in your daily life, the more opportunities for digitalization you notice and start asking yourself: ‘How can I make things differently?’.
The Breadth layer is about having a variety of experiences. It’s about becoming more comfortable with the way we do business whether in a new country or in a new segment. Experience in this layer empowers Associates to make credible and informed decisions and create value for the business.
Experiences expand your business acumen; they help you understand how Mars works as an organization. In this layer you can demonstrate your ability to make strategic choices and create value in a variety of situations and scenarios. Successful experience in this may demonstrate that you can manage better business outcomes.
The People layer gives you experience in people management, a critical capability for managers and leaders across the organization. If you wish to manage large scale teams, significant experience will be required as part of this people layer.
Gaining experience across Finance pillars will help Associates gain perspective, business understanding and be more credible when making decisions. You build functional skills by gaining experiences in at least two of the three job families within the Finance function (i.e. Innovative Business Partnering, Smart Financial Operations, Enhanced Specialized Services) as well as some experience in the Digital space.
The Breadth layer is about having a variety of experiences. It is about becoming more comfortable with the way we do business whether in a new country or in a new segment. Gaining this experience empowers Associates to take more credible and informed decisions and understand where the value comes from. Some of these experiences can be checked off simply by working in project teams that are cross-segment, cross-country, or within different types of business models (i.e. Mature vs Emerging markets, CPG vs Retail, DTC or Services business, Shared services business).
