Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

These days every discussions in analytic and business intelligence areas eventually end up with "speed of analysis". Since SAP introduced HANA - the buzzword is about speed, real time, near real time dashboards. Everybody wants to talk about a cloud application - so they can get up & running with applications tomorrow, and if its deployed on HANA - more than happy since they get it faster. So CIO can start getting his dashboard from next week, every time he looks at it - its just near real time. Isn't it faster ROI ? Gone are the days when it used to take few months to get systems up and running, 3 hours everyday to get those BI reports and tune those dashboards where "Go Live" was a big event. The only question remains - When CIO looks at that new dashboard created in 3 minutes rather than 3 hours - how much time does it take to tell you that your data in the system is bad.  No surprise here. Last week I was talking to a procurement executive from a rep...

"We are investing so much in our Master Data Management efforts. Can you not use the data  that is clean and standardized during that process as a input to Spend Analysis portal - so we an achieve both simultaneously with low cost ?". You might have heard this question - if you are in a customer meeting with those techno savvy big companies just starting off on optimization drive. What would be your answer ? If you are a sales person - you will think of it as a another negotiating tactic by customer, if you are a IT guy - I can see that smile on your face, if you are a business person - you think its absolutely possible, and if you are a Spend Analyst consultant - your answer is Yes and No. I personally think - I don all these hats, but for this blog - I am a Spend Analyst. So let me explain why Yes and why No. Yes - If - when you started your MDM initiative you talked to "right" consultant and created a road-map as to how you can accommodate Spend Analysis as a...

These days everybody talks about cost cutting, increasing revenue, how the depression, recession affecting company margins and how the job losses are imminent and so on and so forth. All this is true and real and no doubt everybody is looking at new avenues to struggle with the numbers. Though there is no magic recipe to alter the scenario overnight, lot of people, lot of companies are failing to see optimization chances within the organization and chance of increasing revenue – data in their own systems. What data – everything – right from suppliers, customers, materials. What to look for – Data Quality. The surveys done by few companies in the area estimated that the by managing the data quality one can increase revenue by 66%. Now let’s take that as marketing gimmick on the face, but then assume its half of that – still there is a chance of revenue increase of 33% - do you want to believe that? I do. My experience with large global enterprises in the data area points me to bel...