The Bottom Line
Well, that’s a bold headline, isn’t it?! Who wouldn’t want a crystal ball to understand the impact of the rise of BRICS, the volatile USD, whether we’ll have floods, fires or other natural disasters to deal with this winter…the list goes on!
If anything in this edition of The Bottom Line raises concern or curiosity for you, reach out. Great outcomes start with great conversations!!
The good news is that, while we haven’t figured out how to build a crystal ball, we are helping businesses to plan, budget, and forecast for a range of possible futures using Extended Planning & Analysis tools, providing significant competitive advantage when it comes to being ready for whatever the world throws at us.
The one thing every well-run business has in common is a business plan – usually generated annually and stemming from an agreed budget. However, it’s typical that you and your business leaders face a range of scenarios throughout the year where you need (either on an ad hoc or unstructured basis) to collect data to inform decisions that fall outside of the best-laid plans. These scenarios could be investment opportunities, a divestment, market, supply chain or resourcing challenges, or the need to understand and reduce operational risk exposure.
It’s a universally acknowledged truth that, as CEO, you can’t do everything. But one of the most valuable and impactful decisions you can make this year is to understand where your business sits in terms of data maturity – which includes data security, privacy and literacy. And then, take a deep breath and spearhead the drive to make your organisational data accessible, available, and accurate – so your people are equipped to make better and faster decisions and improve outcomes.
We all know that good data is regarded as a significant business asset. But until it can serve a greater purpose (or you lose access to it), it’s not worth its weight in gold. This is where you come in. As CEO, you are responsible for setting the strategic direction for the entire organisation. For many, contemplating freeing up your data from its cross-company silos and analysing it may seem daunting in terms of budget, time, and scope. However, the good news is that getting more value from your data is not an all-or-nothing scenario. You can start with the most trusted data in the business (usually your financials and general ledger), then move on to payroll – which, again, tends to be highly accurate, and continue in incremental steps.
By leveraging the power of your data at a manageable pace and adopting a perpetual process of continuous progress and improvement, your people can learn on the job. And with real-time data available to fuel their reporting (scenario and otherwise), they can measure, report on, and improve the performance of both the business and your people.
Critically, they – and you - can make decisions based on facts, not best-guess predictions – so risks to the business are minimised.
In an ideal state, business planning is ongoing and collaborative right across the organisation. This offers the benefits of speed and ownership, which positively impact talent retention and attraction – two of today’s most significant business issues.
A final suggestion. Start with the guiding principle of data, i.e., develop a data management strategy that focuses on what you need to keep your business competitive and secure, and leverage your data effectively through meaningful analytics and reporting (Data + Analytics = Gold).
And then, look for the right partner and technology to help you systemise your organisational objectives.
ANZ General Manager - Corporate Performance and Data Management - Fusion5
Sustainability is, with good cause, a hot C-level topic. And your ability to be sustainable is increasingly important to those you do business with.
In fact, Deloitte reports that 46% of organisations have begun requiring business partners across their supply chain/value chain to meet specific sustainability criteria. And according to Forbes, 88% of consumers say they will be more loyal to a company that supports social or environmental issues.
As COO, accessing and compiling the information required for sustainability reporting likely falls under your remit. This could include the impact on your energy and water consumption if you move to an eco-friendly building, the amount of business and everyday commute travel, supply chain transportation costs, company vehicles, recycling initiatives, employee wellbeing, and much more.
Even if you’ve not already begun this process, we’re sure you can well imagine how hard it’s going to be to find and extract the wide range of information you need just as a sustainability starting point - and then transform it into usable information to empower improvement within the business. And it often means converting non-financial information into financial information to prove the bottom-line value of change.
The transition to being a sustainable business requires access to accurate data as a minimum starting point – and this data can be both diverse and non-monetised – from employee information to community demographics, carbon reporting, environmental parameters related to air, water, soil, noise, climate change, and biodiversity, to financial data.
It’s fair to say that sustainability reporting is a challenging area for many businesses and often requires specialist help and knowledge. This isn’t helped by constantly changing metrics as information about environmental impacts changes, and reporting standards are in flux. All of which compounds the difficulty of keeping up with data management and meaningful reporting.
Yet, despite the complexities involved, it’s hard to say ‘no’ to the drive or the directive to become a (more) sustainable business. And with Stanford Social Innovation Review saying that over 90% of CEOs state that sustainability is important to their company’s success, you’re not alone in the ‘get it done’ spotlight.
None of it is easy – but it’s the ‘how to get it done’ that poses the most significant hurdle – beginning with establishing what data you need and how you can access it. And finding someone with the know-how and capability to make it happen?
We just so happen to have a full-time sustainability reporting consultant on our team. So perhaps contacting us is an easier place to start?
Nel Botha
Practice Manager - Planning & Analytics - Fusion5
As a CTO, you’ve got myriad responsibilities – from customer behaviour, operational performance, to market trends and more. So, looking for ways to deliver meaningful, efficient, and well-informed decisions and outcomes for each is not only sensible, but smart.
Here are three ways you can use data and analytics to support your role, and make well-informed, fact-based decisions.
With the ability to analyse customer behaviour and preferences, you can gain insights into what they want and need – and what frustrates and excites them. And when you understand the customer experience, and where it excels or falls short (and have the evidence to support it), you can make confident decisions about how and where to develop your products to gain that all important competitive edge. The same is true for employee experience. If the users of your business applications are all internal, that makes them customers too.
For example, your employee experience and support platform may be lagging well behind that of your competitors. If it doesn’t provide your employees with options to submit requests for enhancement or new workflows and forms to improve their productivity, then you’re falling short of their expectations. This begs the following questions: Do you know how many enhancements are being submitted, and how are they being prioritised? How frequently are you currently pushing out new automation to your employees? And are they satisfied with the services you offer?
This is all data worth knowing and analysing for the greater good - in short, it’s gold.
On top of that, when you analyse both user behaviour and market trends, you can use those insights to develop targeted, up-to-the-minute marketing campaigns and deliver better user engagement strategies. All of which leads to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
Efficiency = great processes = cost savings, increased productivity, and improved customer service.
But working out which areas of your business will benefit from streamlining and optimising is often easier said than done. It’s only by gaining access to all the data you need from across the relevant systems, centralising it, and analysing it to produce actionable insights into your operational performance that you can identify areas where processes can be improved. You’ll be able to eliminate (or cleverly circumnavigate) roadblocks, overcome issues created by a reliance on manual or outdated workflows, and best of all, transform frustrated customers into delighted ones.
3. Wise up on your technology investments
How are you making the call on which of your technology investments are paying off? Which are underperforming and costing you too much, or charging ahead and creating valuable new opportunities?
If you’re relying on spreadsheets, downloads of data from disparate systems, and manually massaging your data into shape, then you’re wasting valuable time, effort, and money. By using data and analytics to give you the lowdown, you can optimise the allocation of resources dedicated to the development and support of each worthwhile investment. And you’ll also have clarity of which investments will never deliver a genuine business ROI and should be retired or returned to vendor.
As CTO, you’ve got some big decisions to make – week in, week out. Taking the guess out of guesswork by having access to real-time, comprehensive data and analytics tools could be one of your best decisions of the year.
Edward Zarzour
General Manager - Enterprise Service Management - Fusion5
As a CTO, you’ve got myriad responsibilities – from customer behaviour, operational performance, to market trends and more. So, looking for ways to deliver meaningful, efficient, and well-informed decisions and outcomes for each is not only sensible, but smart.
Here are three ways you can use data and analytics to support your role, and make well-informed, fact-based decisions.
With the ability to analyse customer behaviour and preferences, you can gain insights into what they want and need – and what frustrates and excites them. And when you understand the customer experience, and where it excels or falls short (and have the evidence to support it), you can make confident decisions about how and where to develop your products to gain that all important competitive edge. The same is true for employee experience. If the users of your business applications are all internal, that makes them customers too.
For example, your employee experience and support platform may be lagging well behind that of your competitors. If it doesn’t provide your employees with options to submit requests for enhancement or new workflows and forms to improve their productivity, then you’re falling short of their expectations. This begs the following questions: Do you know how many enhancements are being submitted, and how are they being prioritised? How frequently are you currently pushing out new automation to your employees? And are they satisfied with the services you offer?
This is all data worth knowing and analysing for the greater good - in short, it’s gold.
On top of that, when you analyse both user behaviour and market trends, you can use those insights to develop targeted, up-to-the-minute marketing campaigns and deliver better user engagement strategies. All of which leads to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
Efficiency = great processes = cost savings, increased productivity, and improved customer service.
But working out which areas of your business will benefit from streamlining and optimising is often easier said than done. It’s only by gaining access to all the data you need from across the relevant systems, centralising it, and analysing it to produce actionable insights into your operational performance that you can identify areas where processes can be improved. You’ll be able to eliminate (or cleverly circumnavigate) roadblocks, overcome issues created by a reliance on manual or outdated workflows, and best of all, transform frustrated customers into delighted ones.
How are you making the call on which of your technology investments are paying off? Which are underperforming and costing you too much, or charging ahead and creating valuable new opportunities?
If you’re relying on spreadsheets, downloads of data from disparate systems, and manually massaging your data into shape, then you’re wasting valuable time, effort, and money. By using data and analytics to give you the lowdown, you can optimise the allocation of resources dedicated to the development and support of each worthwhile investment. And you’ll also have clarity of which investments will never deliver a genuine business ROI and should be retired or returned to vendor.
As CTO, you’ve got some big decisions to make – week in, week out. Taking the guess out of guesswork by having access to real-time, comprehensive data and analytics tools could be one of your best decisions of the year.
Edward Zarzour
General Manager - Enterprise Service Management - Fusion5
While it’s obvious that as CFO, you rely heavily on planning and analytics to keep the company on the right financial course and improve business outcomes – your plans can be quickly derailed if the data you’ve been using is untrustworthy.
So, this article isn’t about what bright and shiny new things you can do with your data, analytics, and planning (although these are myriad and exciting), but that significant underlying issue that keeps so many CFOs awake and counting sheep at night. Trust. Because quite frankly, if you can’t rely on the veracity of your data, you need to question every financial report generated and every short- and long-term decision made.
A report by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and Barclays observed that up to 43% of those who took part in their 2016 study were unable to identify the location of their critical data, and a Forrester Consulting report, “The Data Security Money Pit: Expense In Depth Hinders Maturity”, claims that 62% of their respondents we also unable to identify the location of their most “sensitive unstructured data”.
The point being - if you can’t trace (or even locate or access) your data or validate its origin or ownership, it becomes inherently untrustworthy. If you are using data collected from a range of on-premises and cloud locations, from a combination of spreadsheets, your ERP, and other internal and even standalone solutions, then how do you know what’s accurate and true? Especially when it may be duplicated, outdated, entered incorrectly, or vulnerable to ill intent or sheer carelessness.
It's only when you can find a way to synchronise your information, so everyone works from the same accurate and validated data set, that you can generate the real-time analytics needed to make decisions with confidence.
As CFO, you need trustworthy data to generate critical business modelling, safe in the knowledge that the outcomes of your efforts are backed by verified facts, not a reliance on gut feel and dubious data. With up-to-the-minute <insert your business driver/s here> data, you can predict your revenue, optimal staffing and skill levels, your ability to meet project or sales commitments, and more.
Then, you can sleep at night. Safe in the knowledge that the number of actual sheep you’ve counted and reported on to the rest of the business (and the CEO) will always be right – rather than what could, in effect, be a woolly, ‘best-effort-given-the-data-you-can-access’ guess.
If you’d like more information on how to reach that state of peaceful slumber, just ask.
Nel Botha
Practice Manager - Planning & Analytics - Fusion5
As a CTO, you’ve got myriad responsibilities – from customer behaviour, operational performance, to market trends and more. So, looking for ways to deliver meaningful, efficient, and well-informed decisions and outcomes for each is not only sensible, but smart.
Here are three ways you can use data and analytics to support your role, and make well-informed, fact-based decisions.
With the ability to analyse customer behaviour and preferences, you can gain insights into what they want and need – and what frustrates and excites them. And when you understand the customer experience, and where it excels or falls short (and have the evidence to support it), you can make confident decisions about how and where to develop your products to gain that all important competitive edge. The same is true for employee experience. If the users of your business applications are all internal, that makes them customers too.
For example, your employee experience and support platform may be lagging well behind that of your competitors. If it doesn’t provide your employees with options to submit requests for enhancement or new workflows and forms to improve their productivity, then you’re falling short of their expectations. This begs the following questions: Do you know how many enhancements are being submitted, and how are they being prioritised? How frequently are you currently pushing out new automation to your employees? And are they satisfied with the services you offer?
This is all data worth knowing and analysing for the greater good - in short, it’s gold.
On top of that, when you analyse both user behaviour and market trends, you can use those insights to develop targeted, up-to-the-minute marketing campaigns and deliver better user engagement strategies. All of which leads to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
Efficiency = great processes = cost savings, increased productivity, and improved customer service.
But working out which areas of your business will benefit from streamlining and optimising is often easier said than done. It’s only by gaining access to all the data you need from across the relevant systems, centralising it, and analysing it to produce actionable insights into your operational performance that you can identify areas where processes can be improved. You’ll be able to eliminate (or cleverly circumnavigate) roadblocks, overcome issues created by a reliance on manual or outdated workflows, and best of all, transform frustrated customers into delighted ones.
3. Wise up on your technology investments
How are you making the call on which of your technology investments are paying off? Which are underperforming and costing you too much, or charging ahead and creating valuable new opportunities?
If you’re relying on spreadsheets, downloads of data from disparate systems, and manually massaging your data into shape, then you’re wasting valuable time, effort, and money. By using data and analytics to give you the lowdown, you can optimise the allocation of resources dedicated to the development and support of each worthwhile investment. And you’ll also have clarity of which investments will never deliver a genuine business ROI and should be retired or returned to vendor.
As CTO, you’ve got some big decisions to make – week in, week out. Taking the guess out of guesswork by having access to real-time, comprehensive data and analytics tools could be one of your best decisions of the year.
Edward Zarzour
General Manager - Enterprise Service Management - Fusion5
Let’s start with a story. A manufacturing business was counting on the timely arrival of a big load of raw materials – when the worst possible event happened. The freighter sank, and its waterlogged cargo was unsalvageable.
This presented an immediate problem as the raw materials on the ship were vital ingredients of a best-selling product they depended on for revenue over the following six months. The sinking scuppered all chances of getting the product made in time to meet seasonal market demand and expectations – and getting the materials quickly and affordably from elsewhere to manufacture the end product within the same schedule wasn’t possible.
So, the business ended up with two problems. First, they couldn’t make the product they relied on for income in the expected timeframe. And second, it left a big ocean-sized hole in their production schedule.
Any CRO will recognise the value of what-if business modelling in this circumstance. It provides an accurate picture of the impact on sales (and therefore revenue) and helps model what will happen if that gap is filled in another way to meet customer demand. From using substitutions, to finding a ready-to-go white-label alternative to rescheduling another product to make which can fill the hole in the production line schedule and supplement sales in the meantime.
Business modelling, when done well, simulates how your business runs so you can explore your options and predict the upstream outcomes. For example, you can see the impact on revenue, resources, and plant utilisation if products A and B are swapped – and find viable opportunities to fill the gap while factoring in the logistics of how your business and its supply chain operates.
You can also predict the knock-on effect of your key product being unavailable on your sales team. If it affects their commission and, therefore, income, what staff retention risk does this present? And what can you do short-term (for example, a commission restructure or incentive programme) to maintain their income expectations without significantly impacting your bottom line? And what exactly happens – between employee payroll and sales income - if you do this?
Business modelling and reporting help you see the impact on your revenue when you voluntarily or otherwise have to accommodate change so that you can make decisions based on all current, correct and relevant data.
Which is where we get to the nub of the topic. To effectively model your business future, you need to capture, analyse and model the right data - the data representing how you run the business – from sales to stock, resources to capabilities, payroll, and more. And without that (accurate and trustworthy) data, and the right systems and tools in place, your future revenue in times of change is a best-case estimate.
As CRO, business data is your best friend. So, ask us how to take the guesswork out of your outcomes and revenue.
Nel Botha
Practice Manager - Planning & Analytics - Fusion5
This edition we're putting a spotlight on 'predicting the future' - otherwise known as 'Planning and Analytics' or 'Corporate Performance Management'. Join Ben Schofield and Philip de Harcourt as they talk about how an excess of data is making planning and analysis tools more important, and the fine line between using spreadsheets appropriately, and them becoming an unhealthy (and unsafe) addiction.
00:55 What does 'predicting the future look like in 2023?'
02:42 What impact do Planning & Analytics tools and practices have on profitability?
03:23 How can Planning & Analytics solutions help architect competitive advantage?
04:55 Financial Planning & Analytics is now Planning & Analytics for all - why is that?
06:30 CPM or ERP - which is the right 'single source of truth' system business should be using?
08:57 What role do spreadsheets play in planning, forecasting and budgeting, and at what stage should you be 'going beyond' excel?
12:00 What's the alternative to spreadsheets, once it becomes negligent to be relying on them?
14:44 What's the one thing you wished people understood better about Planning & Analytics, and Corporate Performance Management?
17:37 What advice would you give organisations seeking to build competitive advantage on how they should get started?
18:45 How can business leaders easily compare and assess the many Planning & Analytics tools on the market?
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