Corporate finance functions frequently possess sufficient reporting but insufficient execution speed. Financially relevant operational signals are often distributed across ERP, sales, procurement, inventory, logistics, treasury, customer-service, and reporting systems, creating delays between signal detection and corrective finance-led action. This paper introduces financial decision latency as the elapsed time between a financially material business signal and a verified corrective action affecting cash, margin, revenue risk, or working capital. A Finance Signal-to-Action Framework is proposed with six stages: financial signal identification, cross-system data mapping, financial impact translation, ownership and escalation mapping, workflow activation, and outcome measurement. The architecture preserves existing systems of record while adding a governed analytical control layer for Physical Data Element (PDE) mapping, signal extraction, cash-impact scoring, decision-rule orchestration, and traceable action closure. A discrete-event simulation was conducted over 180 operating days using 11 fragmented enterprise systems, 180,000 open receivable items, 95,000 inventory records, 42,000 purchase-order lines, and five baseline architectures: spreadsheet reconciliation, dashboard-only finance reporting, static ERP alerts, centralized finance analytics queueing, and process-mining diagnosis. Results show that the proposed framework reduced median financial decision latency from 42.8 h to 9.4 h relative to spreadsheet reconciliation, reduced P95 latency from 126.5 h to 34.7 h, lowered blocked-invoice resolution time by 61.8%, reduced preventable DSO drift by 28.6%, improved cash-risk exception closure from 54.2% to 89.1%, and produced USD 5.26 million in annualized net economic value. The findings position finance decision latency as a measurable control variable in enterprise architecture and working-capital management.
Donepudi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.