The Ledger

Establishing Your Smart Manufacturing Strategy to Drive Profitability

“A critical issue for the business is profitability and, in serving that primary goal, to continuously improve or even transform operations so you can remain profitable over the long run. To ensure your smart manufacturing strategy drives profitability, focus on how it helps leverage data to keep costs down and productivity up. Think also about how to leverage data to build a more agile and flexible business so you can more quickly respond to market conditions. Finally, automate manufacturing systems with an eye toward making data available, so you can more effectively address problem areas, whether it be speed, quality, waste or material losses.”

Read More at Forbes Magazine >

Have You Realized the Full Value of Your FP&A Software?

“The process of implementing FP&A software is as critical as the quality of the solution, according to new research.

CFOs know the importance of financial planning and analysis solutions that allow their finance teams to develop budgets and forecasts quickly and accurately. Unfortunately, selecting the right FP&A software is only half the battle. Equally important is how that technology is implemented across the enterprise, from training users and setting their expectations to ensuring that they receive continued support after the software goes live. Absent a successful implementation, a company will never realize the full value from its investment.

Read More at CFO Magazine >

How Technology is Re-Shaping Your Business Models

Effective business models must include three features: the target customers of the business, the value proposition for those customers, and the value chain architecture. Innovation in digital technology allows organizations to redefine and recreate their business models by giving organizations the flexibility to redraw their value chain architecture. This not only creates new value propositions for existing customers but can also change the customer set. Redrawing business models start with changing the sequence of the value chain.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Your Data Strategy May Not Be as Stable As You Think

Data is now considered the world’s most valuable asset. There are plenty of great ideas and techniques in the data space: from analytics to machine learning to data-driven decision making to improving data quality. However, there is an overwhelming amount of data and it takes a lot of time and effort to succeed with it. Bad data makes it nearly impossible to become data-driven and adds enormous uncertainty to any technological progress.  Companies need a means to monetize that data, essentially a business model for putting the data to work, at profit. The ultimate goal is to leverage your data in ways that create new growth, cut waste, increase customer satisfaction, or otherwise improve company performance.

Read More at The Harvard Business Review >