As corporate finance executives look to increase cash  flow they invariably call on the credit department to adjust working capital cycles and bolster receivables collection. But there is more to increasing cash flow then simply nudging customers to pay faster. Find out how to uncover hidden cash through better credit department management in  this 3-hour workshop led by Pam Krank, president and founder of The Credit Department Inc. Krank will demonstrate how even the smallest companies can  benefit from simple, but important process adjustments, including using existing software – such as Microsoft Access and Excel – to produce vendor credit scores, and managing good and bad credit portfolios more efficiently.

Krank will use real-world examples to guide participants through several important credit and collection management techniques that are sure to make a difference in your cash cycle. She will also provide participants with a credit department policy template that is a roadmap to improving the credit management results at your company. 

During this workshop you will learn how to:

• Set appropriate credit lines based on your risk tolerance
• Eliminate simple, repetitive tasks and move on to credit strategy
• Work with slow-paying customers to establish regular, secured interest-bearing payment notes to get them current again
• Get paid faster consistently with less resources
• Score a vendor’s credit worthiness, as well as the credit worthiness of global affiliates
• Use software and technologies that already exist within your company to determine and track credit worthiness through credit scoring rather than relying on expensive third-party data services
• Set up an electronic file cabinet for credit information you need to keep on hand
• Become a secured creditor when the risk warrants
• Automate collection letters so a small staff can work efficiently in a multi-tasking environment
• Avoid running into ERP snags, and more

What does it take for CFO’s to adapt and thrive for today’s business realities? The CFO role has never been more important to the ongoing health of a company. At the same time, the role is evolving beyond the traditional training. To serve margin control, risk assessment - new and untraditional data is needed with increasing analytical sophistication.  Technical mastery of the numbers is only the beginning to effectively protecting and guiding the company. All this while caught between short and long term needs, competing stakeholders and extreme daily pressures. In this keynote, Alexander Grashow will share 30 years of practical tools, techniques and examples  for overcoming your toughest barriers to growth.

Corporate sustainability metrics are beginning to pique the interest of CFOs, as the numbers become more readily available via channels like Bloomberg terminals and in credit rating reports. Still, CFOs need to know more about how sustainability reporting and rules affect corporate finance now, and how it will affect the future of corporate finance.

Jeff Klein, a founding trustee of Conscious Capitalism, Inc. and author of Working for Good, will explore the unique role CFOs can play in fostering the resilience and sustainability of their companies. Jeff will draw from the principles of Conscious Capitalism and share stories of successful companies and their leaders who embrace this emerging new approach to business. And he will invite Summit participants to explore an expanded perspective on their role as CFOs.

Exhibit Hall Grand Opening: Networking Luncheon in Exhibit Hall

Join this interactive panel to discuss the controversial scenario of a CFO facing a difficult decision. You'll see a multigenerational group of panelists present the case and their individual (and often opposing) views. The audience (you!) will then discuss the case and subsequently propose a solution. It's a fresh new approach to knowledge exchange that will be lively and revealing!

Giventhe volatility and unpredictability of modern markets, the imperative of developing a more resilient and sustainable enterprise has become a top priority in most organizations.  In spite of the inarguable need to adapt in order to thrive (or even survive) in every sector, there is a regrettable tendency among most companies to focus on policies, practices, and procedures, and not on the people who ultimately drive an organization to success (or ruin). Dr. J.T. Kostman, an internationally recognized expert on leadership in times of crisis, chaos, and change, will share insights on ways in which CFOs can quickly cultivate their own leadership abilities and help foster organizational cultures of adaptability, resilience, and sustainable success.

Networking Refreshment Break: Exhibit Hall

-101 All Hail King Cash: A New Study on Midsize Companies from CFO Research
Celina Rogers, Editorial Director, CFO Research Services
Keith Zonts, Director, Business Development, American Express

-102 The Road to Reconciliation: Achieving Balance-Sheet Integrity
Bob Davenport, Solutions Consultant, BlackLine Systems
Geoff Jegier C.P.A., Accounting Consultant, Kimberly-Clark
Hakan Aytekin, Partner, KPMG

-103 Why the Payables Market Is Leaning Toward Alternative Payment Solutions vs. Traditional Manual Disbursements
David Disque, Director of Operations, CSI globalVCard MasterCard
Don Crandall, CFO, CSI globalVCard MasterCard

-104 Budgeting and Planning Made Easy: 
How Health Integrated Transformed Itself by Empowering Its Executives 
(Workshop sponsored by Host Analytics)
Karen Edwards, VP of Finance, Health Integrated

-105 Using Integrated Financial Management Applications to Drive Business Insight and Operation Efficiency
(Workshop sponsored by NEC Corporation of America)
Jim Collins, Performance Management Strategy Executive, IBM 

-106 The Impact of Your Retirement Plan on Your Bottom Line
Joseph Gelly, Managing Director, Fiduciary Solutions, Russell Investments

Networking Reception: Exhibit Hall “Wheel of Finance"

In the past 30 years, the economy has ignited and extinguished more opportunities than any other force, with the possible exception of Oprah. In that time, China and India fed our zombie-like appetite for iPhones, Prada, and Snuggies. As they lifted millions out of poverty, their biggest customer, the U.S., found itself in debt, undereducated, and covered with recreational tattoos. Will the U.S. avoid the fate of Greece or some D-List celebrity? Can our legendary ingenuity save the American economy and your business? Steve Faktor, author of Econovation, will challenge conventional thinking on what the next decade will look like as the U.S. transitions from consumerism to "producerism." Mr. Faktor will define five emerging growth areas, identify who is best positioned to capitalize on them, and explain how attendees can prepare their businesses to do the same.   

Where are the hidden assets in your financials? How are you accounting for the future costs of under-priced energy, emissions and water?  Which products and services are boosting revenue while improving quality of life for customers? Does your capital allocation process reward investments that reduce under-analyzed risks? Discover the leading indicators of financial performance, which can drive profit and shareholder value higher -- or lower -- and how you can implement these "new metrics" towards a more sustainable, resilient business.

Moderator R. Paul Herman of HIP Investor Inc. will lead the discussion, joined by executives from centuries-old large corporations who retain their competitive advantage by adapting their performance measures and management systems to integrate these "new" drivers of success.

Innovation has been slow to arrive in the equity markets, but its time may be here. As stock markets slam shut on growth-stage companies, executives need alternative paths to boost operating capital and provide liquidity to early-stage investors and employees. This session explores some of the groundbreaking platforms being developed to facilitate access to institutional investors, structured funding, and crowd-sourced equity and deliver efficient equity capital execution.

We're at a moment of (apparent) massive globalization, where labor, capital, and ideas come from all around the globe and interact in ways that can be unexpected and unpredictable. At the same moment when we need a more global perspective on the economy and social issues, most of us are getting less international news from broadcast media and newspapers. Participatory media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter can give us a broader worldview, but these tools are configured to favor local connections over international ones. How do we "rewire" the Internet to get the information we need to thrive in a global age? Ethan Zuckerman runs the Center for Civic Media at MIT, which focuses on these issues, and co-founded Global Voices, an aggregator of civic media from the developing world. He explores a world in which "bridge figures" contextualize news from the far corners of the world, where volunteers translate key information faster and better than professionals, and where "engineered serendipity" helps us discover what we might need to know.

-306 Stay or Go? Corporate Location Planning 
Tim Myllykangas, Principal, Cresa

-004 How the Finance Team Can Help Drive Execution
Gregory D. Cameron, CFO, GE Capital, Americas

- 005 Expanding Globally? Take a Stress Test.
Dr. Shan Nair, Co-founder, Nair & Co.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2012

002 Global Business Outlook Breakfast, sponsored by American Express
-Kate O’Sullivan, Director of Content Development, CFO magazine

Each quarter, CFO, together with Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, surveys hundreds of senior finance executives around the world to find out what finance executives think about the state of the economy and the prospects for their own businesses. This long-running study, now in its 63rd consecutive quarter, serves as a valuable predictor of future spending in a wide range of categories and provides timely, accurate data on a host of trends that matter to the CFO as well as to financial regulators and policy makers. Join us for an in-depth look at the most recent results of this prestigious study.

Opening Remarks
-Kate O’Sullivan, Director of Content Development, CFO magazine

Post Great Contraction, making sense of a new, complicated and interdependent global environment, where politics, economics, demographics, technologies, mother nature, and ideologies can cooperate or collide is a necessity. How will aging, de-leveraging, globalizing, emerged markets, governance paradigms, technological breakthrough or environmental constraints affect our lives, strategies and investments? Eric Noël will explore the world in 2030, suggest scenarios, and help focus the mind on the strategic implications, opportunities and risks of irreversible changes.

How do you build a company to last, especially in today’s volatile global economy? What steps can a CFO take to help create a resilient business? Entering new markets, introducing new products, and developing new partner and supplier relationships enable companies to not only survive but to grow. In this panel discussion, experienced CFOs will discuss their companies’ resilience and the decisions they made to protect and expand their businesses in these challenging times.

There are so many competing forces in this global world economy that the myriad sources of conventional wisdom often coalesce to point in opposite directions at the same time. In times like these, someone with clarity needs to step up and instill order, and CFOs are capable of embracing the complexity. They sit at the intersection of systemic ambiguity and trained instinct to narrow our focus and manage our way out of this situation. The answer lies in providing a context for our management systems to reattach meaning and value to all of our operations. That is the challenge of the day and one that the CFO is uniquely positioned to tackle.

For initiatives to be successful in the long term, they need to deliver operational value. The challenge for financial professionals is that measuring the return from soft or indirect benefits can prove difficult.  In this session we’ll examine different ways to measure the value of an initiative and explore frameworks that can be applied for consistently measuring soft benefits.  We’ll review the core metrics of ROI, TCO, and NPV, and how these standard metrics can be applied to nontraditional initiatives. The session will then explore the four specific types of benefits and the different approaches that can be used to credibly assess the operational results. Attendees will come away from the session with a measurement framework that can be practically applied to their own organizations.