The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) and NetSuite (News - Alert), a provider of ERP solutions and cloud-based financials, recently released a report, “Rising to the Challenge - Productivity in Accounting and Finance Organizations.”

The report highlights the new problems faced by finance companies and organizations today and also offers solutions to solve these problems.

The research comprised a survey of 1,726 IMA members who represent finance companies across different industries. Some of the key challenges emphasized in the report are to streamline processes and boost productivity to reduce costs, making productivity gains through improvement in business processes, improve strategic metrics such as planning, budgeting, forecasting, cost and profitability analysis, upgrading IT systems for smooth global operations and enhance communications across teams in a company.

Dr. Raef Lawson, IMA vice president of Research who spearheaded this research project, said, “The need for accounting and finance professionals to evolve into more strategic roles within an organization is a longtime area of study for IMA. The findings of this research report demonstrate our commitment to these endeavors, as they will help our members and the profession at-large both to identify and meet their most pressing challenges.”

The research, which was co-sponsored by IMA and NetSuite, found that productivity gains can be achieved through improved use of technology and innovation. And by integrating a company’s IT systems, employees can be responsive to their customers.

Ron Gill, CMA, CFM, chief financial officer of NetSuite, said, “As these results indicate, the issues of streamlining processes and improving productivity are critical to an organization's ability to overcome many of these identified obstacles. Accounting organizations should be able to greatly benefit from the insights offered in this report and we are pleased to have assisted IMA in producing it.”

Apart from financials ERP software, NetSuite offers a broad suite of applications, including accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), professional services automation (PSA), and ecommerce.

In other news, OSF Global Services, a company offering SLA-grade professional services, has recently joined the NetSuite Solution Provider Program.

OSF officials said that the new step of joining NetSuite Solution Provider Program boost their long-standing partnership with NetSuite and also helps them in capturing the growing business opportunities available with the entire line of NetSuite's cloud-based applications.