Tag Archives: Planning
Dan Bongino: Are the Democrats Planning a Post Election Coup?
Well, duh… it’s been planned and executed the last four years, so I’m sure they have a new an improved plan for the next four years.
COVID-19, Business Continuity Planning & Dynamics 365 CRM
This Company Achieved Record Breaking Sales Thanks to COVID-19, but Couldn’t Keep Up. the Right CRM Solution Could Have Made All the Difference
In recent weeks, COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on businesses in virtually every industry. Many organizations are currently focused on business continuity: they’re concerned with how they can continue operating under these difficult conditions.
But shouldn’t just be limited to getting through the difficult times. On the contrary, it’s also important to think about how you’ll continue to keep up in the face of unanticipated success. A recent customer experience I had was the perfect reminder of this.
A Surprising Story in the Face of COVID-19
Like most of us who are stuck working from home, I’ve been doing my best to stay active — and any excuse to get out of the house for a little physical activity is a good thing. With this in mind, I decided to buy a new bicycle. I’d always wanted a classic beach cruiser, and now was the time to finally make that purchase.
When I went online to shop around, however, I was surprised to find that most stores were sold out. I couldn’t even find a used bike for sale in my area, much less a brand new one.
Finally, I found a manufacturer with excellent reviews that produces its bicycles in California. The company had grown from a startup based in the CEO’s then-garage to a business of more than 40 employees and $ 8 million in annual sales. I made my purchase, happy to support a growing domestic business.
CRM Challenges from COVID-19
It’s been over a month, and unfortunately, I still haven’t received my bike.
Of course, businesses all across the country are struggling to meet customer demand in the face of COVID-19. On the other hand, though, the bike was supposed to be in stock, and the company’s website indicated that it would ship within 5 business days.
When I reached out to customer service, I received an auto-response with some disappointing information. First off, the company indicated that it was now receiving 3-4x more emails per day than usual, and was struggling to keep up. Customers with existing orders could expect a delay of 5 days or more before receiving a reply — despite the fact that the bicycle company hired more staff to try to keep up. Further, their outdated inventory system had caused them to sell a number of items that they didn’t actually have in stock, and they had to stop accepting new orders as of April 17th. Finally, they indicated that they hoped to reopen the website and start taking new orders again in May.
Business Continuity with the Right CRM Solution
With so many companies struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic, businesses like this one are the exception to the rule: they actually saw a major increase in demand for their products as a result of COVID-19.
Unfortunately, they weren’t prepared for the spike in sales. As a result, they’re both missing out on sales and damaging their reputation with customers.
As the head of the marketing team at , I know that this business could benefit from . With a scalable cloud solution like they’d be in a better position to keep up with a sudden jump in demand. A solid CRM solution is essential for customer tracking and communication, especially when the unexpected happens.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are realizing how important it is to have a business continuity plan in place for unpredictable times. If you’re ready to develop a plan of your own, AKA can help: to learn more.
Not sure if this is the right time to start on a new project? Take a look at our recent blog, .
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Article by: Amy Spencer | 212-502-3900
Amy leads the marketing team that is responsible for go-to-market strategies, messaging, and demand generation for AKA’s financial services and life sciences practices, as well as the company’s cross-industry offerings. She is also responsible for the processes and systems, such as marketing automation and CRM, that the team employs to align marketing with sales for a greater impact. Amy earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications from The College of New Jersey and has 25+ years of experience driving the marketing strategy and execution for technology and professional services firms.
Startups: How to Manage your OEM for Exit Planning
Reading Time: 3 minutes
In the modern-day startup business, an exit to public markets through an initial public offering (IPO) of stock has become increasingly challenging due to regulatory pressures and less-than-desirable market valuations. Look no further than what happened to WeWork. Today, founders and institutional investors of startups are more focused on developing an exit strategy that involves selling to a larger player in the market. During the course of developing a robust exit strategy, most startups often overlook key decisions while building their product that might cause problems downstream, when future acquirers start to value the business for acquisition. In this short article, we examine the topic of software OEM as it pertains to future acquisition consideration.
In my prior article, Focus your Energy on your Application, not your Infrastructure we compared building infrastructure capabilities for an application software startup to using OEM software for accelerating time to market and other efficiencies. Similarly, when it comes to exit planning there are trickle-down decisions that have to be made at the product level and should be carefully considered as it might impact exit valuations.
Let’s explore this further with a startup M&A example
Company A and Company B both compete with each other in a hotly contested startup market for next-generation, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven HR software that employs machine learning and lots of data integration. Both companies, A and B, have raised nearly the same amount of venture capital, enjoy similar market success, and both have very good teams. Company C, a large publicly-traded company is now looking to “fold in” a market-leading AI technology into their existing HR application software and has decided to buy either Company A or Company B.
While going through initial product exploratory calls with Company A and Company B, the acquirer puts a small table together that might look like this:
| Category | Company A | Company B | Risk |
| Product Completeness | 95% | 90% | N/A |
| Technology | Ruby on Rails | Node.JS | Minor as both products are mature |
| Infrastructure | Homegrown | OEM | Company A has an older version and a lack of permissible licenses. Need to drill down. |
The CTO of Company A always insisted on using the “best” engineered solution, even if the long-term consequences were not fully vetted. In the case of Company A, the CTO chose to use a myriad of open source tools and homegrown, customized adaptations to address the data integration requirements for their HR solution, which often needed to connect with multiple ‘cloud’ solutions like Salesforce, and ‘on-premises’ solutions like PeopleSoft. In building everything in-house, engineers in the trenches of development made suboptimal choices. When incorporating open-source tools that lacked permissible licenses and also require heavy customization, Company A made it difficult for Company C to merge with their infrastructure. Moving off those investments when an acquisition happened would not be easy for Company C (or any other company for that matter) and would perhaps require a triage-based re-architecture approach at different levels of the infrastructure software stack.
In comparison, Company B has a Founder/CTO who is a pragmatist who continuously optimized for speed to market along with scale and cost of ownership. As such, Company B employed OEM-based tools to address infrastructure needs for connectivity, analysis, and so forth. In addition, the OEM tools have “assignable” contracts, which means they could be easily incorporated into Company C, with little legal risk. They also put in place strict measures behind selecting and using open-source tools without explicit permission from the CTO.
As evident in the above example, the good intention of Company A’s CTO results in a scenario where, after years of product development, the acquiring Company C has to rip and replace core infrastructure elements of the product to de-risk the acquisition. This will result in a longer path to market after post-merger integration. Given this situation, Company C decides to reduce the valuation for Company A by 30%, which doesn’t sit well with the founders and investors of Company A, and in the end, results in Company B being acquired.
No one approach is the perfect way to grow your software infrastructure investments. There are always pros and cons. That said, it is wise to keep a couple of sacrosanct best practice rules in place as follows:
- Insist on using permissive licenses, especially when incorporating open-source software
- When incorporating OEM software into your startup software, insist on “assignable” contracts, so that at the time of acquisition the acquirer can take ownership of the contract with the least amount of legal friction
The best way to think through your infrastructure investment is to consider a balanced strategy that considers speed to market, customer needs, and future acquirer objections that might arise.
Learn how TIBCO’s deeply embedded OEM solutions can help you get your tech start-up’s infrastructure right and allow you to focus your energy on your applications.
New Year’s Resolution: How About a new Approach to Budgeting and Planning?
Posted by Rami Ali, Senior Product Marketing Manager
Congratulations are in order! You finally wrapped up the annual budget during the craziness of the holiday season. Talk about multi-tasking.
Each year, organizations scramble through multiple iterations and approvals to finalize the annual budget before the yearly deadline. The process kicks off as early as June, and accounting and finance teams hope to wrap up the annual budget by November/December so they can effectively track and manage organizational performance in the new year.
Everyone is now firming up their New Year’s resolutions. From more exercise to less screen time, resolutions are all about improvement. So, when it comes to professional or organizational goals, why not put a better budgeting and planning process on the list this year?
Reflecting on last year’s budgeting process
With the budgeting season over, let’s take a moment to reflect. It’s easy to jump to the next order of business and forget about the unbearable pain and lengthy hours spent back and forth with stakeholders. While it’s fresh, what are some key takeaways that can be used for improving your next planning and budget cycle?
- How would you compare the process (from beginning to end) to the prior year?
- How long did it take to reach the first draft or submission of the budget?
- How many iterations did the budget go through before being finalized?
- How many levels of approval did the budget have to go through?
- How many approvers required visuals or ‘less-numerical’ ways of presenting the budget?
- How many approvers asked for additional insight into historical data?
- What tools and systems did you use in the process?
Budgeting and Planning in 2020
Now let’s set goals for improvement. Were there any identifiable risks or bottlenecks in the process? What would the executives like to see more or less of? What about other stakeholders? This is, after all, a partnership.
Goals could be potentially look like:
- Reduce the budgeting cycle time by up to 90%
- Reduce the number of levels of approval
- Increase the amount of executive involvement
- Enable stakeholders/approvers to access data themselves
The tools to get there
Finance teams need to take a hard look at the tools, systems, and steps in the overall process to map out new tactics in realizing these goals. Here are a few recommendations:
- Single source of data: Data moves through systems and tools. Any time data passes from one system to another, there is room for human error. Integrating systems and data can enable finance to have a single place to view the entire business and how the pieces fit together as they build out their annual budgets.
- Enforce new deadlines with stakeholders: The annual budget process involves many partners and stakeholders across the organization. Communication of deadlines is critical to producing the budget on time. Why not introduce new deadlines that enable your team more time to finalize their own analysis and recommendations? Make the process and expectations clear to all parties involved prior to the budgeting season.
- Leverage rolling forecasts: A continuing trend in the world of financial planning and analysis, rolling forecasts enable teams to have greater flexibility in their planning process. Typically, a rolling forecast extends 4-6 months into the future, giving businesses the agility to better allocate resources.
- Adopt new budgeting and planning technology: Most of the challenges in the budgeting and planning process stem from leveraging the wrong tools. Organizations rely too heavily on multiple spreadsheets that get lost in the shuffle of the season. Budgeting and Planning software [NF1] exists to help organizations streamline the budgeting process by bringing together systems and stakeholders in one controlled environment.
How NetSuite could help?
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting facilitates both company-wide and departmental planning with modeling capabilities, approval workflows and reporting within one collaborative, scalable solution. A cloud-based planning and budgeting solution makes data accessible, in real-time, to everyone who needs to see such information. Accessibility boosts participation and accountability, making it easier to get meaningful input and engagement.
Learn more about NetSuite Planning and Budgeting.
by NetSuite filed under
3 Ways to Fine Tune Your Budgeting and Planning Processes for the New Year
Posted by Rami Ali, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) teams play a crucial role supporting major corporate decisions of the CFO, CEO, the Board of Directors and department heads. Unlike accountants who are in charge of recordkeeping, financial analysts are charged with examining, analyzing and evaluating the entirety of a corporation’s financial activities and mapping out the company’s financial future.
The FP&A function is under constant pressure to provide more strategic value and insights for its organization. With many groups finishing up, or still working on, their 2020 planning cycle, the pain and struggles are still top of mind. Now is the time to fine tune the approach to planning and budgeting for the new year.
Here are three ways to get more out of your budgeting and planning process:
1. Increase collaboration.
When it comes to business, collaboration is vital. After all, no single department can do its job for long without the other departments pulling their own weight. But for some reason, when it comes to the numbers it can feel like every department is on its own. Data is often stuck in departmental or functional silos, making it difficult or even impossible for other departments to get the information they need to do their jobs well—to understand potential risks and opportunities for the business. Financial collaboration becomes easier when you stop relying on static spreadsheets. It starts with getting the entire team working with one, trusted set of numbers, and building on a foundation of accurate, up-to-date data. Teams should collaborate to eliminate version control issues and establish role-based permissions that enable process owners to control who can access and edit data.
2. Become more agile.
With the rising volume and complexity of data, automating manual tasks will allow FP&A professionals to truly rethink how they work every day. They can spend less time and energy on repetitive, manually intensive work, such as collecting, consolidating and reconciling spreadsheets, and free up more time for to serve as valued business partners. And to be a valued business partner, FP&A teams need to be able to tell management teams what the data means and make recommendations so the business can act on it, whether that’s a new product launch, customer segmentation initiative or supply chain inefficiency. Once the data collection process has been completely automated and data integrity is ensured, you end up with a harmonized and accurate view of the business. Not only will this save time but will also allow information to get to stakeholders more quickly and accurately.
3. Enrich your data analysis.
Businesses perform more efficiently when they are able to adapt and respond to the business climate. Using modeling techniques, predictive analytics, multiple ‘what if’ scenarios and rolling forecasts as part of the planning and budgeting process can help minimize uncertainty in the business. FP&A professionals are able to be more responsive in a fast-moving market and are able to deliver reliable analysis and operational reports to more accurately facilitate decision-making.
How to accomplish this?
As great as spreadsheets are for some things, collaboration, agility and analysis aren’t words you think of when describing that tool. Yet, many FP&A teams continue to rely on spreadsheets to manage the planning and budgeting process. With spreadsheets it’s easier to introduce errors and harder to be collaborative, and they are unsuited for the complex dynamic planning and reporting organizations require. FP&A ends up spending the bulk of its time verifying that the numbers are up to date and accurate. As a result, the team doesn’t have time to work with stakeholders to deliver insightful analysis that will really help in planning for company growth.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting facilitates both company-wide and departmental planning with modeling capabilities, approval workflows and reporting within one collaborative scalable solution. A cloud-based planning and budgeting solution makes data accessible, in real-time, to everyone who needs to see such information. Accessibility boosts participation and accountability, making it easier to get meaningful input and engagement.
For more information on planning and budgeting, download the e-book, High Impact Planning and Budgeting for all Types of Growth.
by NetSuite filed under
Integrated Business Planning For High Tech: How Platforms Improve Execution And Drive Differentiation
In the vocabulary of today’s digital economy, “high tech” and “innovation” are virtually synonymous. This emphasis on innovation has driven a dramatic expansion in the definition of what high tech as an industry delivers to customers.
Today, it’s not just the computer on your lap and the phone in your pocket. It’s also the car you drive and the gadgets that control your home. It’s appliances with touch screens, shoes with sensors, watches with GPS. Across an ever-increasing range of possibilities, the high-tech industry prides itself on delivering products that change the way we live and work.
Innovation is so deeply ingrained in the high-tech industry that customers expect it. Innovation has become the norm – a commodity in itself. This, in turn, is making customer experience and service into an increasingly important differentiator.
Yes, coming up with the next big product is essential to staying relevant. But at the same time, the pressure is relentless to drive down costs, increase efficiency, and maximize ROI across all areas of operations – even in the face of ever-growing infrastructure, development, and research efforts.
Differentiation, in other words, is not exclusive to product innovation in the high-tech industry. It is also increasingly dependent on excellence in areas such as manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain management – and one of the keys to success across all of these areas is to develop an integrated business planning platform that helps tie all relevant activities together.
Platform considerations
For brand owners in the high-tech industry, you have to start somewhere – and this somewhere is typically a demand forecast, which becomes the drumbeat of your extended supply chain network. With expensive critical components and long lead times, even the smallest change in the demand picture can wreak havoc in the high-tech industry – particularly when there’s significant lag time between the actual change and the detection of it. And in an industry where demand is volatile and fluctuations are the norm, the ability to respond to short-term changes is critical.
Leading brand owners and manufacturers, therefore, put a premium on platforms that facilitate the ability to detect demand changes in real time and then respond effectively. Such platforms help you standardize and integrate supply chain processes, not only for demand and supply planning but also for collaboration with partners such as contract manufacturers, critical component and commodity suppliers, distribution partners, and customers. With the integration of disparate systems and the ability to handle the big data volumes associated with a global supply chain, you can realize the operational and planning efficiencies that help to drive down costs and improve performance.
A platform up to the task for high-tech brand owners and manufacturers should support the following:
- Collaborative sales and operations planning (S&OP): Today, S&OP needs to move from an insular process executed within planning silos to one that reaches out to include all planning constituencies on a more continuous basis. A robust platform helps to pull all relevant partners – inside and outside of the organization – into the planning process where quick collaboration can happen based on a single source of trusted data.
- Response and supply planning: To respond more effectively to demand fluctuations and supply disruptions, platforms should allow you to mix multi-level demand and supply matching and rough-cut capacity planning with embedded analytics and exception management – including the identification of gating factors. This can help you better prioritize demand, generate effective allocations based on promises to deliver, and improve response management.
- Inventory optimization: A platform that supports multi-echelon inventory optimization can drive down working capital investments and drive up service levels by helping you plan more effectively regarding inbound raw materials and finished goods in distribution centers. For outsourced manufacturing, this can also drive down off-balance-sheet liabilities. Support for demand-driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) with advanced analytics also makes it possible for you to develop better profiles of decoupling points and related buffer stock positions while generating a continuous flow of goods – thus reducing the MRP nervousness that is prevalent in the extended supply chains of the high-tech industry. This can help reduce the risk of stock-outs, optimize inventory carrying costs, and reduce the dependency on forecasts that are never perfect.
- Demand planning and sensing: By mixing data on historical trends and seasonal patterns with, say, live data from sell-in and sell-through data (even down to point-of-sales systems), you can sense shifts in demand in real time. Statistical models can help you develop accurate mid-term forecasts, while demand-sensing capabilities enable you to react to near-term demand changes as they occur. You can also use machine learning technology to identify correlation patterns and automate the detection of demand changes.
- Multi-tier supply chain collaboration: Most high-tech supply chains rely on multiple tiers of trading partners that need to be aligned effectively. As opposed to regular physics, information in supply chain networks typically flows easier upstream than downstream. So, next to communicating forecast and demand information upstream to multiple tiers of manufacturers and suppliers, it is important to also obtain more real-time information of manufacturing status, inventory on-hand, and on-order positions of trading partners to make better and more informed decisions. Highly effective companies leverage the power of business networks to achieve scalability and lower the hurdle of onboarding or switching suppliers – thereby increasing resiliency and automation.
- Real-time monitoring: To help tie all activities together and monitor events in real time, you also need some sort of visibility layer – a dashboard, cockpit, or control tower. Such a layer should enable you to not only track critical KPIs but also drill down into the details without having to jump over to separate systems. From such a monitoring environment, you should also be able to manage alerts, run simulations, and even collaborate with partners as needed.
As high-tech brand owners and manufacturers continue to seek out ways to compete more effectively in crowded markets, the ability to execute on business plans and respond with agility to changing market dynamics is becoming an increasingly valuable point of differentiation. A proper, integrated business planning platform that helps you consolidate your view of all relevant data and act on that data with confidence can help you improve decision-making, speed your execution, and – ultimately – enhance the customer experience with quality products that meet demand.
To learn more about best practices for integrated business planning in the high-tech industry, download the IDC report on digital business planning.
Integrated Business Planning For High Tech: How Platforms Improve Execution And Drive Differentiation
In the vocabulary of today’s digital economy, “high tech” and “innovation” are virtually synonymous. This emphasis on innovation has driven a dramatic expansion in the definition of what high tech as an industry delivers to customers.
Today, it’s not just the computer on your lap and the phone in your pocket. It’s also the car you drive and the gadgets that control your home. It’s appliances with touch screens, shoes with sensors, watches with GPS. Across an ever-increasing range of possibilities, the high-tech industry prides itself on delivering products that change the way we live and work.
Innovation is so deeply ingrained in the high-tech industry that customers expect it. Innovation has become the norm – a commodity in itself. This, in turn, is making customer experience and service into an increasingly important differentiator.
Yes, coming up with the next big product is essential to staying relevant. But at the same time, the pressure is relentless to drive down costs, increase efficiency, and maximize ROI across all areas of operations – even in the face of ever-growing infrastructure, development, and research efforts.
Differentiation, in other words, is not exclusive to product innovation in the high-tech industry. It is also increasingly dependent on excellence in areas such as manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain management – and one of the keys to success across all of these areas is to develop an integrated business planning platform that helps tie all relevant activities together.
Platform considerations
For brand owners in the high-tech industry, you have to start somewhere – and this somewhere is typically a demand forecast, which becomes the drumbeat of your extended supply chain network. With expensive critical components and long lead times, even the smallest change in the demand picture can wreak havoc in the high-tech industry – particularly when there’s significant lag time between the actual change and the detection of it. And in an industry where demand is volatile and fluctuations are the norm, the ability to respond to short-term changes is critical.
Leading brand owners and manufacturers, therefore, put a premium on platforms that facilitate the ability to detect demand changes in real time and then respond effectively. Such platforms help you standardize and integrate supply chain processes, not only for demand and supply planning but also for collaboration with partners such as contract manufacturers, critical component and commodity suppliers, distribution partners, and customers. With the integration of disparate systems and the ability to handle the big data volumes associated with a global supply chain, you can realize the operational and planning efficiencies that help to drive down costs and improve performance.
A platform up to the task for high-tech brand owners and manufacturers should support the following:
- Collaborative sales and operations planning (S&OP): Today, S&OP needs to move from an insular process executed within planning silos to one that reaches out to include all planning constituencies on a more continuous basis. A robust platform helps to pull all relevant partners – inside and outside of the organization – into the planning process where quick collaboration can happen based on a single source of trusted data.
- Response and supply planning: To respond more effectively to demand fluctuations and supply disruptions, platforms should allow you to mix multi-level demand and supply matching and rough-cut capacity planning with embedded analytics and exception management – including the identification of gating factors. This can help you better prioritize demand, generate effective allocations based on promises to deliver, and improve response management.
- Inventory optimization: A platform that supports multi-echelon inventory optimization can drive down working capital investments and drive up service levels by helping you plan more effectively regarding inbound raw materials and finished goods in distribution centers. For outsourced manufacturing, this can also drive down off-balance-sheet liabilities. Support for demand-driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) with advanced analytics also makes it possible for you to develop better profiles of decoupling points and related buffer stock positions while generating a continuous flow of goods – thus reducing the MRP nervousness that is prevalent in the extended supply chains of the high-tech industry. This can help reduce the risk of stock-outs, optimize inventory carrying costs, and reduce the dependency on forecasts that are never perfect.
- Demand planning and sensing: By mixing data on historical trends and seasonal patterns with, say, live data from sell-in and sell-through data (even down to point-of-sales systems), you can sense shifts in demand in real time. Statistical models can help you develop accurate mid-term forecasts, while demand-sensing capabilities enable you to react to near-term demand changes as they occur. You can also use machine learning technology to identify correlation patterns and automate the detection of demand changes.
- Multi-tier supply chain collaboration: Most high-tech supply chains rely on multiple tiers of trading partners that need to be aligned effectively. As opposed to regular physics, information in supply chain networks typically flows easier upstream than downstream. So, next to communicating forecast and demand information upstream to multiple tiers of manufacturers and suppliers, it is important to also obtain more real-time information of manufacturing status, inventory on-hand, and on-order positions of trading partners to make better and more informed decisions. Highly effective companies leverage the power of business networks to achieve scalability and lower the hurdle of onboarding or switching suppliers – thereby increasing resiliency and automation.
- Real-time monitoring: To help tie all activities together and monitor events in real time, you also need some sort of visibility layer – a dashboard, cockpit, or control tower. Such a layer should enable you to not only track critical KPIs but also drill down into the details without having to jump over to separate systems. From such a monitoring environment, you should also be able to manage alerts, run simulations, and even collaborate with partners as needed.
As high-tech brand owners and manufacturers continue to seek out ways to compete more effectively in crowded markets, the ability to execute on business plans and respond with agility to changing market dynamics is becoming an increasingly valuable point of differentiation. A proper, integrated business planning platform that helps you consolidate your view of all relevant data and act on that data with confidence can help you improve decision-making, speed your execution, and – ultimately – enhance the customer experience with quality products that meet demand.
To learn more about best practices for integrated business planning in the high-tech industry, download the IDC report on digital business planning.
Intelligent Planning: Boosting Business With Advanced Analytics
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” –Michael Jordan, NBA Hall of Fame
Basketball, like all sports, requires a strong plan before the game starts. But from the moment of the first tip-off, the plan needs to be assessed and adjusted. The same is true in business.
Every plan must start with analysis of past results. This can be used as the baseline to determine where the business is going and measure success in the future. Past results, as everyone knows, are not always indicative of the future.
Machine learning provides tremendous insight regarding market trends and business drivers. These factors include market propensity, consumer demand, economic factors, weather, and transportation costs. Many companies take these variables into consideration but provide limited or time-consuming analysis. This process limits corporate agility.
IDC learned from a survey in 2018 that 88% of responding organizations were still using spreadsheets as their primary planning vehicle. Most of these organizations were only able to create plans for the entire fiscal year and started the process over again in nine months for the following year.
Path to improved results
For years, the finance organization has heard the hype of analyzing Big Data. Despite 36% growth in this area, according to Dresner Advisory Services, the finance department is the laggard for adoption. The leading reason for that has been ease of use, or lack thereof.
Imagine if machine learning could predict what the most likely numbers should be based on past results. An example of this is “smart alerts for profit & loss.” This embedded capability identifies anomalies that are not correlated to the expected results and notifies the financial analyst. The analyst has the ability to override if necessary. The analyst could also interact with the system verbally. “Show me the variance….” Or “Show me the top 5 factors impacting this result.” In all of these scenarios, it is machine learning enhancing, not replacing, the financial analyst.
How does it work?
Intelligent scenarios are embedded in modern cloud applications to provide the most up-to-date insight by analyzing the actual data being used by the systems of record. This enables users to react to analytic results in the context of their business process or workflow.
Intelligent apps can be developed to modify the embedded machine-learning scenarios and create insight from the harmonized data from various departments. This insight is then integrated into the corporate planning process.
Some practical examples
- A luxury manufacturing company in Europe that specializes in windows and skylights determines the probability of failures in their products. These projections are integrated into their planning process to ensure that proper resources, both labor and parts, are in the budget. The company has not only realized cost savings from this process; it has also seen improved customer experience.
- A leading retailer relies on machine learning to understand business drivers. This company is constantly monitoring its production data as well as store demographics. These factors are analyzed before, during, and after each quarter. The company cannot afford to wait until the following year to adjust plans. Understanding the propensity of potential customers within a specified radius is a key element of the plan. The faster the planners can determine the effect of business drivers, the more accurately they can adjust the plan. To them, planning is an ongoing process, not an event.
- Airline and transportation companies have always had to deal with impending events outside of their control that impact their plans. Fuel is the most obvious. The price of fuel in the future can have a deep impact on profitability and thus the overall business.
- Like the manufacturer example, predicting the probability of parts failing could also have a huge impact on costs, not to mention revenue. If the plane, truck, or ship is not available, there will be lost revenue.
- Weather is even harder to predict but has an impact on all these industries. Manufacturers in the building supply business have improved their forecast accuracy by integrating weather and housing-start data into their forecasts. Combining this with analysis of regional stores has helped in creating create an actionable plan that improved sales by 10% in the first year.
In summary
The concepts behind machine learning and advanced analytics are not new. Technology has provided an opportunity to empower everyone in the organization. Machine learning, intelligent robotic process automation, and chatbots will provide tremendous efficiency benefits. The real value will come from the improved productivity of the workforce and better business outcomes.
Intelligent planning combines the power of embedded machine learning and analysis tools in the cloud. With these capabilities, today’s business user can accomplish in a fraction of the time what a team of scientists took months to do in the past. The benefit is satisfied customers, happier employees, and increased profits.
This article originally appeared in FP&A Trends and is republished by permission.
Did you know that SAP offers a personalized Business Scenario Recommendations report free of charge? Learn why and how to order one by joining our webinar on September 26th.
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Webinar Planning Fundamentals That Will Set You Up for Success
Webinars are a powerful but underutilized marketing tactic that can help you ramp up your demand generation and retention efforts. These events are extremely effective because they allow you to serve up fresh content, interact with your audience, go deep into what sets you apart from competitors, and learn first-hand what troubles your customers so you can further personalize your marketing efforts. Furthermore, when used wisely, they allow you to attract, educate, and nurture your target audience at every stage of the customer journey.
At Act-On, webinars are an integral part of our marketing strategy because they give us an opportunity to connect with both prospective and current customers. These live web events don’t only allow us to share our expertise and offerings with our audience, they also provide an opportunity to learn what’s keeping them up at night and what questions they’re hoping we can answer to get them back on the path to marketing success. In short, webinars benefit us just as much as they do our customers because they allow us to learn more about what they expect us to deliver.
Are you convinced yet? If so, keep reading for a few essential tips to help you plan your first event or help you make your current structure even more effective.
Pick a Topic That Will Entice Your Audience
The possibilities are endless when it comes to choosing webinar topics, but not every subject will guarantee you an audience. If you want to attract current and future customers to sign up for your event, you have to offer them something of value and provides them with answers to some of their most pressing questions.
Luckily, figuring out what your audience wants to learn about can be fairly easy, and there are a variety of ways in which you can mine topic ideas to continuously fuel your webinar marketing efforts. To start, you can survey your audience via email, social media, and even at in-person events to find out what they would like to see you present on in a future webinar. You can also look at your analytics to gain a sense of keywords searched by your target customers and formulate your topics to match those pain points and interests.
Landing on a topic that piques the interest of your target customers is the first step toward ensuring that your webinar is successful. The great thing is that once you’ve got the ball rolling on webinars, you can even ask attendees to suggest ideas for future events so you’re never stuck contemplating your next webinar topic.
Choose a Presenter Who Brings Credibility to The Table
Webinars are a great way to establish your company as thought leaders in your industry. To do that, however, you have to choose a presenter who instills trust and credibility in your audience. Choosing a presenter who brings a great amount of expertise will not only enhance your audience’s perception of your brand and what you have to offer in your webinar, it will also motivate them to engage with your content in the future.
When choosing a presenter, start by looking at qualified leaders within your organization. Getting your target audience acquainted with the main players at your company is an excellent way to show them that your entire team knows what they’re talking about and are qualified to solve their problems.
Partnering with an influencer within your field is another excellent way to build your credibility and also expand your audience. Your target customers are likely to turn to these influencers when looking for recommendations on a product or solution, so this is the perfect way for you to get on their radar.
Promote Your Event to the Right People
When formulating your webinar promotion strategy, keep in mind that casting a wide net won’t always get you the most bang for your buck. For example, if you are planning a webinar intended specifically for individuals working in the retail sector, your resources will be better spent and your marketing efforts will yield more conversions if you specifically target people affiliated with that industry.
For optimal engagement, create targeted lists and tailor your emails to match the interests and industry language of the individuals you are hoping will attend your webinar. For paid ads, make sure to get as specific as possible about who you expect to view your promotional efforts, and make sure you are investing in channels that appeal the most to your target customers.
Don’t Forget to Continue to Engage Customers After Your Webinar
Very few attendees are likely to immediately convert to being customers after attending your webinar, so you should have a game plan of how you plan to stay in touch and keep them engaged once the event is done and gone.
Following up with individuals who signed up is also a great opportunity to capture potential customers who couldn’t make the webinar due to a scheduling conflict or who were absent on PTO. A follow-up email is a subtle way for you to get back on their radar and continue to nurture a relationship with them that will eventually make them want to learn more about what you’re all about.
For best results, we recommend segmenting your audience and entering them into targeted automated nurture email campaigns so you are able to engage your new contacts with relevant and targeted information. This will enable them to see value in what you have to offer past the webinar, motivate them to engage, and hopefully get them on the path toward becoming loyal customers.
How To Attain Effective Business Planning By 2020
Effective integrated business planning is a challenge for many organizations that are trying to manage business processes holistically despite the siloed approach they instilled to gain visibility and accountability on business users and systems.
Many organizations that have achieved best-in-class outcomes still suffer from a high degree of systems complexity. They have been left with a stagnant technology landscape that requires highly specialized users and produces business continuity risks due to limited solution skills, maintainability, supportability, and upgradability.
Many of these highly complex business processes have taken a long time to mature, and stakeholders still may not understand the reasons for specific processes and what value is delivered during each step of the process. This creates resistance to change intended to take advantage of new capabilities and technologies, such as machine learning, process automation, and scenario planning reliant on Big Data, and to shifting away from highly customized to highly configurable solutions.
Further concerns arise when the competition (emerging or existing) adopts new processes and technology that can leapfrog your organization’s outdated platform and progresses at a pace never before seen. Top talent is also drawn to newer platforms, whether for the modernized user experience, new capabilities, or personal value gained through expertise in new, evolving technology that increases employment value.
In my experience, business leadership must prioritize business planning as a guiding light to competitive advantage – and back it with the right resources, focus, and technology – so big problems can be solved by skilled individuals and routine tasks can largely be automated. It’s shocking to see how much time talented individuals spend manually gathering and distributing data and responding to rudimentary questions that could easily be visible to end users if they had access to current and concise data.
Furthermore, far too often, people who should be focused on planning are drawn into firefighting because their plan and assumptions are not executed due to technology disconnects between planning horizons. This leads to distractions and limits their time to investigate the root cause of a problem.
Finding the opportunities
Look within and outside your organization to find where opportunities lie to:
- Deliver the best experience for your customers, as ultimately, they are the key party at risk in the process and part of the reason that so much complexity exists. Get this right, and they will do your job by owning the demand plan and being much more understanding when things don’t go to plan. This planning must come from the customer, and there must be visibility to incentivize the customer to work collaboratively in the planning process.
- Remove offline, decentralized guesswork or areas where people waste time. I strongly believe if you have the right people, they will know where they add value and where they waste their time, which limits value. In addition, invest in innovation management capabilities to allow enterprise-wide ideas to be captured, reviewed, and implemented. This is where strong management helps paint the path of where to focus the employees’ newly gained time and capture and share the benefits to highlight the benefits of this repurposing.
- Consider the organization’s goals and pain points. For most customers, this is their biggest problem; unless they have a strong management team to challenge the norm and provide good support for the ups and downs, innovation and ambition will be constrained, and the organization will quickly revert to silos of activities and accountability, regardless of the flow on effect.
We are addressing the challenges of effective business planning with a collaborative enterprise approach incorporating customers, supply chain, finance, and suppliers to deliver long-lasting, innovative outcomes focused on the opportunities above.
Download the IDC report “Leveraging Your Intelligent Digital Supply Chain” to find out how an end-to-end digital supply chain – from design and planning to manufacturing, logistics, and operations – addresses the operational pressures of tracing good across the supply chain to drive sustainable processes.