Neil Demuth, Head of Commercial Finance at Burges Salmon discusses how the firm uses BigHand Business Intelligence.

How important is financial data visibility?

It's absolutely imperative. I think the financial economics of the way that a business is performing is critical to understanding the dynamics of how profitable each of your practice areas is. That helps ensure that you're adopting the correct strategy. If a practice area is not performing the way you'd like, having clear visibility of the financial data can then help steer a plan to incrementally grow and hopefully improve the financial performance coming from that department.

What advice would you give to other firms?

It’s all about having a good project team. You need to have good people around you to ensure the project gets delivered on time and within budget. I think the other thing you need to ensure is that you’re getting senior leadership and board member sponsorship. Get them engaged with the product to gain their support on how it will be rolled out business-wide. This will help ensure it is adopted as part of the project and help sell the opportunity to invest in the BigHand product.  

What are your predicted industry challenges?  

It’s all eyes on the numbers for me. We’re continuing to work in a very volatile environment with the financial headwinds in the economy. The potential of a general election next year will always be quite disruptive to the way business operates. Ensuring you have robust financial data and a team who can explain to partners what the information means will be key as we successfully navigate the next few years.