Software That Cares

Customer-Care SoftwareSoftware That CaresCall-center software, the software that support staffers use when they’re answering phone calls from customers, is changing its name and expanding its functions. Now more likely to be called customer-care software, new packages use workflow functions to in...

By John Xenakis • Sept. 1, 1998

Robert Ripp – AMP Inc.

When Robert Ripp came to AMP Inc. in 1994 as the first CFO hired from outside the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based company, he was given two challenges rarely trusted to the head of finance: help AMP run as one cohesive, global unit, and make it more customer focused.To achieve these goals, the 57-...

By Joseph McCafferty • Sept. 1, 1998

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

High-Wire Act

From the perspective of, say, a start-up PC company, local-service telecommunications companies have it made. Wall Street’s fervor to supply capital to those fledglings knows almost no bounds. Indeed, the industry is awash in cash.But for all their wealth, young telecoms operate in a tough enviro...

By Jinny St. Goar • Sept. 1, 1998

A Fine Spin-Off, With No Taxes

Where Ford Motor Co. and The Limited Inc. have feared to tread, Torchmark Inc., headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, is preparing to go. If the $2.3 billion insurance and financial services combine stays the course, it will become the first company to exploit a tax-code provision that permits a ...

By Linda Corman • Aug. 1, 1998

Foreign Connections

Foreign ConnectionsNotebook computer users trying to use their modems from hotel rooms in foreign countries find myriad sockets to plug into, and rules that vary from country to country. But users can get connected from anywhere fast if they know how.Texas Instruments Inc. teaches how, in a one- ...

By John Xenakis and Edward Teach • Aug. 1, 1998

State Tax Audit 1998

1998 State Tax Survey ResultsFor years, corporate tax departments and state tax administrators have been locked in an escalating battle of wits. The more aggressively tax collectors pursued corporations, the more vigorously corporations challenged the boundaries of tax law and enforcement. Aggres...

By Ian Springsteel • June 1, 1998

Forum: Scrap Capital Project Evaluations

In the world of finance, there are few activities more entrenched than capital project evaluations. These evaluations, which rely on net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) techniques, keep countless analysts hard at work, while consuming an enormous amount of managers’ and dire...

By Roy E. Johnson • May 1, 1998

401(K) Sticker Shock?

Last fall, the Department of Labor (DoL) finally took on an issue that has dogged 401(k) plans ever since they began using mutual funds as their primary investment vehicles. That issue is plan costs, including administrative fees, investment expenses, and all other charges paid by either employer...

By Robert Stowe England • May 1, 1998

All for One, Or None for All?

The world wants international accounting standards, which promise to reduce accounting costs, improve comparability, and promote more efficient markets. And over the past 10 years, standard setters have come close to transforming this ideal into a reality. But members of the International Account...

By Ian Springsteel • April 1, 1998

The Ranks Grow Thinner

Advice to corporations regarding on-again, off-again mergers of auditing firms: The recent collapse of the proposed union between KPMG Peat Marwick and Ernst & Young may not signal an end to upheaval. As long as auditors face a pressing need to improve their own bottom lines, consolidation re...

By Lee Berton • March 1, 1998

Where Cash Is Anything But Trash

Judging from the headlines generated by such stock-financed acquisitions as WorldCom Inc./MCI Communications Corp. and Starwood Lodging Trust/ITT Corp., you’d think every CFO in America would prefer to use equity to do deals. Sky-high stock prices, after all, are making possible all kinds of merg...

By Stephen Barr • Feb. 1, 1998

Shall We Dance?

Chemical companies do it. Engine makers do it. Even beer brewers and semiconductor manufacturers do it. They all form joint ventures or alliances with competitors. Who would have predicted that tough competition would foster so much cooperation among rivals? Although no one keeps tabs on joint ve...

By Lee Berton • Jan. 1, 1998

A New Beginning for Case

Category WinnerInternal Audit OperationsAccounting Processing

By Russ Banham • Dec. 1, 1997

TNT’sTax Turnaround

Category WinnerTax OperationsAs director of corporate fiscal services for TNT Express Worldwide, Tim Brierley needed a globetrotting, never-tire attitude just to keep pace with dozens of acquisitions, expansions, and changes of ownership over the past seven years. But Brierley helped himself, and...

By Ian Springsteel • Dec. 1, 1997

Beyond Mean and Lean

The recent UPS strike has challenged the mantra of just-in-time (JIT) inventory. Shelves empty of raw materials left some companies wondering if operating mean and lean is worth putting the bottom line in jeopardy.“You have to be lean all along. It doesn’t do any good to be overly prepared for wh...

By Cathy Lazere • Nov. 1, 1997

Back for More

Every private-placement issuer should enjoy Tim Vatu-one’s headache. “One of the most difficult things was paring down the list of investors,” says Vatuone, vice president and CFO of closely held Vivid Semiconductor Inc., in Chandler, Arizona. Even after the fast- growing computer chip designer r...

By Emily S. Plishner • Oct. 1, 1997

External Revenue Service

It won’t beat an end to the corporate income tax, but a rapidly growing number of U.S. companies see big benefits from farming out much, if not all, of their tax compliance needs to outside firms.During the past five years, the percentage of U.S. corporations’ tax compliance costs spent with outs...

By Ian Springsteel • Oct. 1, 1997

Stop, Thief!

One night two years ago at a Sun Microsystems Inc. data center in Bagshot, England, thieves broke through a window and stole 14 servers, powerful computers the size of pizza boxes. There was no mystery about the crime–security personnel saw the break-in on surveillance cameras, but were too few a...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Oct. 1, 1997

It’s a Wrap

Imagine an acquisition that lifts a company’s market value by 10 percent the very day the Dow Jones Industrial Average skids 250 points. “A marriage made in heaven,” says Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Gulley, on news of the $4.9 billion merger between Sealed Air Corp. and the Cryovac packaging divi...

By A CFO Interview • Oct. 1, 1997

It’s a Wired, Wired World

Not long ago, the typical corporate Web site was a low-cost pilot project in search of a mission, a constituency, and a provable return on investment.Today, many of those early efforts have evolved into mission-critical systems. Cisco Systems Inc., for example, expects to move $1.8 billion worth ...

By Jeffrey Ubois • Sept. 1, 1997

The Goodwill Games

There isn’t much peace in M&A-land these days, but there may soon be plenty of goodwill. Or at least much more than finance executives are creating today if, as expected, the pooling method of accounting for mergers gets the boot from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). That’s be...

By Ian Springsteel • Sept. 1, 1997

Sprint Retools the Budget Process

The typical budget, most CFOs will agree, takes too long to prepare, is too detailed, and delivers too little value for the effort put into it. Yet budgeting is usually one of the last areas within corporate finance to be reengineered– if at all.Why? One reason is that the benefits of redesigning...

By Susan Arterian • Sept. 1, 1997

When Bad Things Happen to Good Machines

Last fall, an early-morning fire broke out at 30 Rockefeller Center, in New York City. NBC’s “Today” show was forced to do an impromptu remote broadcast from the sidewalk outside the building. Network producers held curbside meetings and writers wrote news copy longhand as firefighters battled th...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Sept. 1, 1997

CFOs On Review

Remember the old vaudeville joke “The food in this place is terrible–and there’s so little of it!”?That about sums up popular feelings concerning top-level performance reviews; they’re pointless, and they don’t happen often enough.“I know of very few CFOs who have received performance reviews sin...

By Bill Birchard • Sept. 1, 1997

Diligence Undone

When BankBoston announced last January 18 that it was buying a stake in Mercury Finance Co., the bank thought it was getting a great deal in return for all the shares of its own auto lender, Fidelity Acceptance Corp. After all, BankBoston’s investment banker, Merrill Lynch & Co., was pitching...

By Ronald Fink • Sept. 1, 1997