“A lot of organizations have to touch 10 to 15 different applications just to close their books,” Hall adds. “Eastman worked hard to minimize that number, which dramatically improved its scores for transaction processing efficiency.”

The company's approach to technology emphasizes productivity. That's why it has paid so much attention to implementing a single instance of SAP across the enterprise, Espeland says. New software products, like Reval for forecasting commodity hedging and Treasura for cash forecasting, have helped treasury and tax to improve productivity, he adds.

“Benchmarking is fundamental to our approach,” says Eastman controller Scott King. “We develop a strategy, try to execute it and then use benchmarking to find out how well we are doing.”

King echoes Hall in citing Eastman's quicker, cleaner close. “We could see from the data that we were putting a great amount of resources into transaction processing, spending too much time there,” he says. “So we set out to streamline that effort. The benchmark data showed that we made great improvements.”

When Espeland was named Eastman's controller in 2002, he set out on a seven-year journey to transform finance by reducing the effort spent on transaction processing and improving accuracy so that there would be no surprises. “We don't want surprises,” he says. “We cut the closing time in half, got rid of most of the errors, and made the process more transparent. Now we have a quality close.”

The benefits of the improved close go well beyond performing that exercise neatly. By streamlining transaction processing, Eastman's finance staffers gained more time for strategic issues, and it shows in the benchmarking.

“In 2002, 11% of the finance team was involved in planning and strategy,” Hall reports. “In 2009, that number went up to 29%. They repurposed finance to get closer to the business units, and we saw compelling evidence that business leaders were asking for and getting more help from finance in providing insights and analytics.” Hackett polls senior leaders to find out how well they think finance is serving their needs, he explains.

Bringing high efficiency to transaction processing set up Espeland's next play, which was to embed financial expertise within business units and make finance people trusted advisers.

“The Hackett data for 2009 show that 74% of our constituents in the businesses saw finance as an expert or valued partner,” he says. “That was the best combined score Hackett has ever seen. Finance now definitely has a seat at the table with the business units.”