Companies with world-class finance departments operate at a significantly lower cost and with a smaller staff than the typical organization. That's the headline news from a recent analysis by The Hackett Group.

The firm defines "world-class" by evaluating the performance of Global 1000 companies across a range of measures of finance efficiency and effectiveness. It then weights the different metrics and identifies the top-performing finance functions, which it labels "world-class." Typically, about 15 percent of finance organizations in the study receive this designation, according to The Hackett Group.

In the firm's latest "World-Class Advantage" research, these high-performing finance organizations have several advantages, including:

• 36 percent lower cost overall as a percentage of corporate revenue,
• 45 percent fewer full-time equivalent (FTE) finance staff per $1 billion of revenue,
• 36 percent lower labor cost, and
• 59 percent lower transaction-processing cost as a proportion of revenue.

The key question, then, is how a typical finance function can become world-class. A few points jump out in the Hackett analysis. One is that world-class finance teams are 70 percent more likely to have staff with direct operations experience. Another is that compared with their peers, world-class finance functions spend more time analyzing data and less time collecting and compiling information.