Evicted from the Comfort Zone: The Importance of Managing Change

Was your organization’s last Business Intelligence (BI) or Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution implementation received with enthusiastic acceptance or with a wall of resistance?

BI and EPM are meant to be transformative, and that also means disruptive in some way. People will need to leave something behind and make an effort to learn a new software or get used to a new way of doing their work. To the extent a new solution relieves pain, it is more likely to be accepted and adopted. But not everyone will perceive the cost/benefit trade-off as a net positive for themselves, and roadblocks to progress can easily start to go up. (more…)

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How a Computer Game Developer Won with a Modern Planning Solution

Our client, a global entertainment company, has business units spanning film and TV production to computer games and amusement parks. One of our projects there was implementation of a planning solution for their computer game business. A particular goal was to improve the analysis and forecasting of spending on development of each new game through the end of its production phase.

Challenges

Our client was dealing with challenges typical of a spreadsheet-based process. Finance faced a time-consuming preparation effort before each forecast, and during the cycle they had to communicate with each Producer to get their numbers then manually update spreadsheets. (more…)

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Customer Lifetime Value: Something Finance and Marketing Could Finally Agree On?

In the quest to grow the top line (and hopefully, by extension, the bottom line), companies spend significant effort and money to acquire new customers, and then to convince those customers to buy more. But is the marketing and sales budget spent on this quest mostly wasted, or actually delivering value in the long term?

From the distant past I remember my days in FP&A at a certain tech company, when the only thing Finance had in common with the Marketing and Sales organization was a mutual distrust. In Finance, we ridiculed Marketing’s lavish spending on corporate image ads, market development funds granted to distributors, and product giveaways. (more…)

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How I (Accidentally) Deleted Canada

Canada is a beautiful place with nice people. They certainly didn’t deserve the fate I unwittingly bestowed late one budget cycle.

Many years ago I was a financial analyst in a San Jose CA based computer systems company, supporting the worldwide Sales & Marketing organization. In addition to our headquarters staff, we had sales and service offices around the world to develop and support the company’s regional and local markets.

Our budgeting “system” was Excel (as this was before the development of the modern planning systems we have today). (more…)

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Dodeca Answers the Call for a High Performance Planning Solution

A major telecommunications company wanted a planning tool that could support their multiple enterprise planning processes including Annual Budget, Long Range Planning, Monthly Forecasting, and What-If analysis.

They also wanted a system that allowed the business to adapt to new market conditions more rapidly, provided better business intelligence through enhanced analytics and reporting capabilities, and even enabled rolling forecasting. (more…)

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Does your EPM Solutions Implementer Help You Solve Business Problems?

A few years ago I was invited by a senior IT manager of a well-known global company to check up on the status of an ongoing Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) implementation project, and give an informal assessment of how I thought things were going. The project had been underway for at least 3 months and while there was a lot of activity by the implementation consultants working on site, results were not evident. The client was paying a lot, and starting to get concerned.

One of the ways I investigated the situation was by attending requirements discussions with the users of the intended system, in this case an enterprise-wide planning solution. (more…)

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A Business Intelligence Roadmap Puts a Tech Company on the Route to Success

Does this sound familiar? Your company generates a lot of data, but you still lack accessible and usable information. Often, you get a request for a report or need to do some investigative analysis but each time you have to spend significant effort to find and extract data, then create yet another spreadsheet from scratch. Later, you discover that another department routinely uses similar data and you wonder how much duplicated effort could be eliminated if people were better coordinated and systems were more supportive.

That was the situation our client, a computer components manufacturer, found themselves in. While deriving most of their $10 billion revenue from being an OEM supplier to computer companies, they had a growing business selling related products to consumers through a network of distributors and retailers. (more…)

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And the Award for “Best Picture” Goes to …

Oops! During the grand finale of the 2017 Oscars broadcast, in front of a television audience of millions, the wrong Best Picture winner was announced. Only after a couple minutes into acceptance speeches was the error corrected, and the actual winning film and those who made it given their due recognition.

To be sure it was embarrassing for the presenters, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and PwC (the accountants who tabulate the vote and during the show hand to presenters envelopes containing the names of the winners). (more…)

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Success, One Percent at a Time: The Power of Incremental Gains

Here’s an inspirational story for business leaders, as well as sports team owners. Perhaps you’re already familiar with it.

In 2002 Sir David (“Dave”) Brailsford, a former professional cyclist who also holds an MBA, was named to lead British Cycling. Up to that time, the team had won only one gold medal in its long history. To achieve significant improvement in overall performance and results, Sir Dave’s strategy was to make marginal 1% advances in each of a wide range of factors. He examined areas as diverse as aerodynamics, cyclists’ power output, nutrition, sleeping conditions, even the cleanliness of the maintenance truck where tools and replacement parts were stored. (more…)

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How a Performance Scorecard Drove Results for a Major Car Company’s Dealerships

Looking back at Business Intelligence (BI) implementations I’ve been involved in, there are a few that stand out as very memorable for their challenges and results. One of those projects was the deployment of a dealership performance scorecard for a major automobile manufacturer.

Our client sells its vehicles, ranging from small economy cars to pickups and expensive luxury models, through a network of about 1,400 independently-owned dealerships across the United States. The company’s dealership development organization supports the dealers, and closely monitors a range of statistics and performance indicators including detailed financial results, vehicle sales by model, staffing levels, market share, customer satisfaction scores, and others. (more…)

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