News · Recap
The CFO as Master of the System: Our Keynote in Review
22 October 2026 · Ismaning near Munich
At Finance Executive Nexus Integrate, CFOs and finance teams from the DACH region met in Ismaning near Munich on 8–9 October. Fourangle was there as a solution partner — and contributed the keynote on the Transformation Stage: “The CFO as Master of the System — transformation before tool: the sequence decides how well you can steer”, delivered by Francisco Baraona.
We sat in the front row — and were rather proud of the result. The talk landed: plenty of positive feedback from attendees right afterwards, and the conversations at our breakout table kept circling the same question for the rest of the afternoon — in what order do you build the ability to steer? Here are the key messages.
31 per cent — the show-of-hands opener
The keynote opened with a question to the audience: who has delivered an ERP system on time, on budget and on target — deadline kept, budget kept, full scope? Only about 31 % of all software projects achieve all three (Standish Group, CHAOS Report). 69 % miss at least one.
Each dot = 1 of 100 projects. 69 % miss deadline, budget or scope. Source: Standish Group, CHAOS Report.
That this is more than a statistical curiosity became clear from a look at publicly documented ERP failures of the past 25 years — from Lidl to Revlon, Haribo and Hershey, with damages running into the hundreds of millions. The finding across all the cases: four patterns, no software bug.
- Processes not cut, the standard not adopted.
- Data quality and testing skipped before go-live.
- Scope without a gate — everything at once.
- Responsibility unclear — ending up in court.
The chain beneath the magic triangle
Time, cost, scope: pull one corner and you move the other two. The real question is which corner gives way deliberately — and who decides that.
The magic triangle: pull one corner and you move the other two. Target dimensions per the PMBOK Guide (PMI).
Beneath the triangle runs a chain — and every arrow points one way only:
Migrate unclear responsibilities, inconsistent data models and improvised closing processes into a new system, and you get the same problems back — just in more expensive packaging. The ability to steer is built in the transformation that comes first.
Two real-world cases
Case 1 — a carve-out with a business-model shift. A GreenTech provider, separated from a US group in a carve-out while simultaneously moving from a hardware to a SaaS business; the goal: exit readiness within two years. Three options were on the table:
The commercial drivers of every deal became mandatory fields in the CRM — only then was the system decision made. The path to the goal in five steps:
The transformation path from the keynote — goal: exit readiness within two years.
The result:
Case 2 — KPIs down to document level. A B2B software provider with three entities, outdated finance tools and no KPI system. Instead of rolling out a system first, the account mapping was defined first — then Power BI was set on top of each entity's DATEV data. Since then every KPI can be unfolded across four levels, down to the document:
Only the year-over-year comparison at account level revealed a misallocation — one cost type sat in selling expenses instead of cost of goods sold, although every single entry was formally correct. Correcting it via mapping tables and new posting rules made the pricing reliable. The result:
The shared sequence
As different as the two cases are — the sequence was the same:
- Clarify the decision: which decision must the system support? Exit readiness in case 1, reliable pricing in case 2 — the goal came before the tool.
- Define the data structure: commercial drivers as mandatory fields, account mapping before the start — structure before system. The system adopts the structure it finds.
- Roll out the system: only now is the system chosen — and the tool has a clear job instead of cementing the gaps.
- Measure the result and verify in operation: only once every KPI traces back to the underlying transaction do costs, prices and revenues become steerable.
In the standard approach Francisco Baraona derives from this, the system rollout is a gate between operating model and automation: only once the decision is named, the data need derived, the process cut and the requirement written does the rollout begin — agile in delivery, deterministic in acceptance.
Four test questions for the CFO
Data sovereignty means being able to explain every figure back to the transaction that produced it. The keynote framed the four competencies finance needs for that as test questions:
That same sequence shapes our NetSuite projects: steering logic and data model first, implementation second. It is why we co-developed this keynote — it describes how we work.
The speaker
Francisco Baraona
CEO · COO · CFO | Transformation & Value Creation · baraona.de
Francisco Baraona is an executive with more than 15 years of C-level leadership in PE-backed and mid-sized companies. His focus is transformation, turnaround and profitable growth, together with finance and control systems, carve-outs, internationalisation and exit readiness. He works across GreenTech and energy, B2B SaaS, HealthTech and industry.
As CEO he took over a renewable-energy technology company after its carve-out from a US group, completed its stand-alone set-up and moved it from hardware to a SaaS model. He cut vertical integration by 40 %, built subsidiaries in the USA and Japan and sold the company to a US competitor. At TÜV SÜD he led the global CFO agenda for the group executive board.
Want to go deeper?
You weren't at the breakout table — or you'd like to apply the sequence “decision → data structure → system” to your own finance landscape? Talk to us: we'll show you what the path to reliable numbers with NetSuite looks like.