How to Streamline Treasury Management with Jonathan Burkhead

I think the consultative role that treasurers play, treasury professionals play is a vital part of the job. You know, I've always focused on identifying what my internal customers requirements were, understanding their business, understanding their challenges, and then working with them from the perspective of what can we do, utilizing our bank services and products to help improve their process. So that consultative role, you know, I think that's one of the best places where treasury people can add value and demonstrate their value to the organization. In the insurance industry, we developed some products to help collect annuity payments, for example, and it actually drove additional business for the company. And that was, you know, utilizing the bank product along with understanding what the needs were for the company. Cash is cash no matter where you are. So understanding cash flows is key. But understanding the business, like I said before, is very important and understanding what the challenges were. You know, whenever you started a new company, they want to understand what is the business doing, what are the activities, are you domestic, are you international, are you both? You know, all those questions come to the forefront. At each company that I've been at. There's been, you know, an opportunity to learn things that I didn't get exposure to before. For example, at prg, I had my first introduction to pooling. That was prior to the euro. So PRG was an international company and we were able to set up a cross currency pool structure that allowed us to concentrate US dollars back to the US without impacting the actual balances that were in the pool. It was a notional pooling structure that was a great experience there. You can't manage what you don't measure. And so a big part of the metric development is identifying specific KPIs that are key to the business process that you can develop and track to see if you're accomplishing the objectives that you're after. I think Six Sigma came out of, I think it was Japan and was all about quality back then, was, you know, effort to make sure that, you know, you could ensure that there was very little variation in output, in product and quality, met certain parameters and things like that. But at OpenTextNow, we're spending quite a bit of time and developing new metrics to track our progress. And we've gone through a lot of transformation here and we're implementing these reports and KPIs to see if we're accomplishing what we set out to do.