Agility and Integrated Analytics Are Essential to a Scalable Business

Businesses today that strive to get ahead of their competition need to have smarter, faster, collaborative and innovative systems that enable agility and advanced analytics. These organizations need a vision and strategy to define the future digital business state. It’s what aligns people in the organization on the priorities, capabilities, and collaboration required to successfully remove legacy business models and operations. For a business to successfully transform from today’s legacy products and business models to tomorrow’s scalable digital businesses, leaders need the ability to integrate external data sources. Adopting multi-disciplinary agile practices and making internal and external data available for decision making are two of the steps to driving digital core organizations. The most important step is changing the culture.

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Smart Businesses Plan For the Future

Most CFOs have been trained to focus on the past, with historical reporting and benchmarking at the heart of their mission. But as competitive pressures accelerate, they’re increasingly expected to help shape the future too. The businesses that will sprint ahead of the competition in the future are the ones who are actively preparing for events to come through scenario planning today. Proper scenario planning ensures that today’s growing companies are prepared for any conceivable future. Finance teams need the ability to confidently and accurately predict the impact of internal and external changes on the business, enabling the business to be proactive, rather than reactive.

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How Manufacturers Can Leverage Their Data For Actionable Insights

“Manufacturers have a huge opportunity to benefit from data-based insights. Those that are able to analyze and leverage data will be able to make better decisions that propel their organizations to success in a highly competitive climate.”

According to a recent manufacturing technology survey, the use of analytics and data is expected to grow over the next five years. As the capabilities of advanced technologies continues to advance, manufacturers will be able to connect and integrate all pieces of their business: from materials planning and logistics to shop floor output and training. With this comes excessive amounts of data, and simply hoarding all of it is not only ineffective, it is extremely expensive. Manufacturers need to understand what value they can derive from their data that will provide actionable insights for better decisions.

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Are You Relying on The Best Tools to Make Important Business Decisions?

Business leaders need an advanced tool to gain important insights into their business. However, implementing a new technology is only part of the solution, rather than the complete answer to their business challenges. When applying a new technology tool, it is important to integrate it with their organization’s business processes and data management so they can ensure the validity of their analytics. Applying a new IT tool might lead to doing something better than it was being done before, but that might not be the right thing to do. By adding effectiveness at the beginning of the solution, then the right thing will be done, with the right tools, in the right way. Before relying on a new technology for making business decisions, it is important that you can first answer the questions, “why use this tool?” And “how can I best use this tool?”

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Your Supply Chain Could Benefit from A New Take on Budgeting

“With advances in digital technologies and analytics, adopting a zero-based mindset is not about slashing costs in whatever way possible. It’s about finding the resources that are not being used efficiently and reallocating them to improve capabilities, fund growth initiatives and increase competitive agility in a rapidly changing and complex environment.”

Because half of a company’s costs lie in the supply chain or cost of goods sold (COGS), supply chain leaders are under constant pressure to reduce costs. A zero-based mindset is more than hunting down old costs in new ways. It requires a major shift in thinking about spending and cross-organizational commitment, and it’s enabled by digital technologies.

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New Research Proves the Need for a Collaborative Platform for Financial Planning

According to a new study by Ventana Research, one of the C-suite’s top struggles is gaining clear, up-to-date information to support strategic business decisions – typically the result of disparate technologies and siloed departments. ERP systems can only provide a certain level of detail and collaboration, so businesses need a platform that can link data and provide management with a single source of the truth. Plans can reflect both operational and financial data to create hybrid key performance indicators, far more valuable for decision support than isolated KPIs. All businesses know that data is power, but the must understand that it’s access to actionable data insights that determines the competitive edge. Linking information greatly improves planning results and leveraging dynamic technologies to do so improves overall business agility.

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Integration is Essential for Collaborative Planning

Collaborative enterprise planning systems and techniques are being continually enhanced, because FP&A professionals now realize planning is more than just a user interacting with a single model. Collaborative planning requires an enhanced set of technologies not found in earlier planning solutions. Those solutions tended to be little more than calculation machines where data was submitted by users through a standard template and consolidated through the organization’s business hierarchies, with a set of results produced for senior management to review. Many of these capabilities are still required, but by themselves are not enough to support true collaborative planning. To be effective, collaborative planning systems must integrate a number of technologies that together form the basis of a solution.

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Effective Planning Requires More Than Just Your ERP

We live in an age driven by data and, for businesses, the ability to quickly and accurately process large data sets has changed from “nice to have” to “essential” in a relatively short time. It’s crucial for businesses to be able to process data from a variety of different sources from across their operations, regardless of the form that data comes in. Unfortunately for many companies, their ERP alone is not equipped for the task. It is important to find a tool that gives access to data from anywhere inside or outside the business that applies advanced analytics on top of the data. That way, even unstructured data such as text, predictive, spatial, time series, and event streams no longer pose a challenge. Instead, it can be easily harnessed to inform business decisions.

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Scenarios Are Critical for Successful Enterprise Planning

The business world is far too complex to have a definitive view of what’s going to happen 12 months down the road. In this environment, scenarios can play an important role, but only if they are part of an overall collaborative approach. With a collaborative approach, scenarios become in effect a short story about what might happen. They present a snapshot of a future business environment encompassing the market, competitors, and potential customers. The scenario is the basis for a model that places the organization into this environment with respect to the product and services it could offer, the price target, and volumes likely to be sold. From this, what-if scenarios can be generated by looking at the changes required for the organization to improve the projected figures and how those changes would be funded.

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