After eight years rising within the finance team at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Saanchika Weerasinghe has a new challenge: leading finance at Siemens subsidiary Brightly Software.
Brightly is an acquisition but not a new one; it closed in 2022. However, integration into the infrastructure of a corporate giant like Siemens is unfinished. Brightly is a smaller, more dynamic organization, so the best practices and KPIs used at Siemens Smart Infrastructure cannot just be overlaid on top.
Weerasinghe’s job involves taking what she absorbed as VP of finance and finance integration lead at Smart Infrastructure and apply it to a more dynamic, high-growth business.
In the following Q&A, Weerasinghe shared insights into (1) the success metrics for a SaaS business like Brightly (2) her approach to building a high-performing organization and (3) the “unlearning” required when a Siemens best practice doesn’t suit its smaller subsidiary.
How has your experience at Siemens prepared you for this CFO role, and what unique perspectives do you bring to Brightly?
At Siemens, I worked under the [global] CFO, leading the executive office. One of our major initiatives was to exceed our profitability benchmarks against competitors, a goal we met and surpassed.
Watching the CFO lead through strategic portfolio management and scalable growth strategies taught me practical tools and leadership techniques that I continue to apply with my teams at Brightly. Having a strong mentor shaped my leadership style. It’s invaluable to find someone you respect and to emulate aspects of their style that resonate with you.
My experience at Siemens gave me the insight and discipline to guide organizational resources toward sustainable growth. I’m excited to bring that perspective to Brightly as we navigate a dynamic phase of growth and transformation.
How will you approach helping shape the unit’s strategy and ensuring it meets growth and performance goals?
I envision my role as driving the optimal investment strategy, both organic and inorganic. I’m focused on building a scalable organization and leveraging Siemens’ expertise and capabilities. Establishing a set of KPIs and ensuring my teams understand how to meet and exceed them will be essential to achieve this and set them up for success.
The overarching KPIs that Siemens uses to measure success have evolved. At the highest level, we assess organizational growth through revenue and order intake metrics. We look closely at profitability and cash flow. There’s always a mix across these categories for public companies like Siemens. A notable shift at Siemens has been the increased focus on digital revenue, tracking the percentage of total revenue from our digital offerings.
Another critical area we evaluate is resilient revenue—revenue streams from recurring service contracts or software subscriptions that are more resilient to market fluctuations. For example, tariffs and supply chain challenges tend to impact hardware businesses more than software. Those kinds of structural advantages are key to long-term stability.
When thinking about digital transformation in finance, we dive deeper into operational metrics that drive financial outcomes. In the SaaS business, we track key indicators such as customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and annual recurring revenue, all essential to understanding performance and growth. A more recent addition to our KPI set is the number of implemented AI use cases.
Ultimately, operational KPIs must align with strategic KPIs. A constant balancing act between day-to-day operational focus and long-term strategic direction exists.
You’re passionate about developing high-performing organizations. How do you accomplish that within finance?
Fostering high-performance organizations begins with having competent, motivated and empowered people in the right seats who collaborate across teams. Leaders create this high-performing environment and culture to drive success.
It’s easy to have a quantifiable KPI in some departments. For example, the sales function has a measurable quota they must hit; in finance, establishing practical, measurable goals can be challenging. I aim to drive my teams to achieve the set priorities agreed upon at the beginning of the fiscal year. Those priorities are linked back to the overall company strategy. When we have the agreed priorities, it becomes about sticking to the timeline and delivering as an organization.
The finance team isn’t working in a silo, and its priorities impact the broader organization. When addressing my team, I always ask myself: “What would I want to see if I [were] in their shoes?” That helps me remember where I’m leading and brings me back from getting too [far down] “into the weeds.”
Motivation also impacts team performance. Keeping teams motivated requires clear and transparent direction from management and communication. Communication has to happen multiple times, not just once. I am a fan of the famous saying, “You have to hear something seven times before you remember it.”
What’s one career lesson that you have applied in this role?
One should never hesitate to “unlearn” something. We tend to get accustomed to doing things a certain way out of habit or tradition. [However], a big part of continuous learning is letting go of outdated practices.
For example, I moved from a well-established, large-scale organization with its own foundation and rhythm [Siemens] to a smaller, more dynamic company still integrating into Siemens’ infrastructure [Brightly]. Siemens was a well-oiled machine. There were so many teams working in parallel at Siemens that I didn’t have to think about the day-to-day.
When I came to Brightly, I quickly realized that the practices at Siemens did not fit the Brightly structure. I had to take the necessary time to dig deeper, assess new best practices and engage with my team to learn their methods of success.
