The folks from The Hackett Group called today asking to meet with our editorial team in order to brief us on some of the findings from Hackett’s Book of Numbers - an annual research study the firm has wisely used to shoehorn its CFO services into many a large enterprise.

Having always found Hackett’s Numbers text data-rich and insightful, we agreed to schedule a meeting for the first week of April, and we look forward to sharing with you some additional insights from that meeting. However, in the meantime here are two bullets Hackett has extracted from its study to whet our appetites and create some buzz.

• World-class finance organizations now operate at nearly half the annual cost of typical companies and have less than half the staff. At the same time, these finance organizations are dramatically more effective than their peers, are better at strategic business support, and drive improved bottom line results for their companies.

• World-class finance organizations have successfully reduced their cost of finance by 40 percent since 1998, while the average finance organization has achieved only a 19 percent reduction. The efficiency gap translates into an annual cost savings of nearly $140 million for a typical Global 1000 company (with $26.38 billion in revenue). ###