Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

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Journey of procurement transformation begins with …………..Part I

As a part of procurement consulting practice, I used to interact with many procurement end users few years back. During dinner conversations I heard stories and jokes about how that so called “transformation project” is going on for years and after change in leadership couple of times – how nobody knows where it will go. During the 1980s, procurement function’s focus was on creating a well-structured strategic sourcing process. It evolved further over years and moved towards developing sophisticated strategies, cross functional and delivering value to the organization. To achieve these goals – leaders planned for larger “procurement transformation” initiatives. The very definition of “transformation” implies a change from one form to another where the outcome is supposed to be much better. So in procurement world, this means rather than just applying “band aid” approach – changing things here & there – overhaul the existing function with focus on processes, people, techn

Internet Of Things - IOT - Scenarios

In my last contribution we discussed – what is IoT and how this third wave of internet will change the world. Next, what are the scenarios that can be envisioned at this point where IoT will make an impact. On a high level there are 4 that can be listed down. Machine to Dashboard When a device senses something, it will send that data to a dashboard – which in turn will alert certain system to respond. The other system responds depending on a priority and the operation ends there. The most common example of this scenario would be – server monitoring dashboard. Server process fails – a red alert goes to a dashboard – IT person responds to it or server restarts the process. This is not something new. It happens already. In IoT scenario we will see enhanced version of this that will change the speed with which these devices talks to each other. In real life a train collision can be averted in seconds, a plane mishap can be taken care better. The response time and automati

Internet Of Things – Next Wave

Share 0 Share 4 Tweet 0 +1 0 Share The new buzzword in technology is “Internet of Things” (IoT). The layman’s scenario that anybody will tell you is – A vending machine getting out of coke, will sense the quantity of bottles, transmit a message to warehouse that it needs more supply which may transmit a message to nearby transporting trucks to fill the order and within few minutes it’s refilled. So a person visiting, checking stock, placing an order and after processing getting a supply will be things of past. The entire supply chain scene is automated here in the era of IoT. Internet has probably gone through 2 different phases since inception. If I leave technological advances aside – there was an era of “Internet of Content”. People browsed websites to get information. Loads of webpages, images, and

Your Data is Bad - Does it matter if you know in 3 hours or 3 Minutes ?

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

Sustainability Reporting & Analytics Solution

While concluding my recent post of Sustainability Performance Management as a next big thing, I realized that, most of the reader who want to do something, or understand the domain better - the real question is where to start the "Sustainability" journey. So I should write something briefly about this starting point, as I struggled the same question few months back. When you start with any "New" initiative - the first step usually is - to understand where you are right now, so you can determine what to achieve and then define your steps and schedule to get there and how. Sustainability is not any different here. You need to first get all your data - from all your systems, put it on a dashboard solution which provides you different analytical views and reports of the same data - so you know where do you stand with respect to your journey. Its easy to say - but hard to do thing, Getting all data from all your systems spread across landscape is a d

Sustainability Performance Management - Next Big thing in EPM

Since last few years, the industry focus is on optimization initiatives. It was outcome of a thought process post slow down few years back. So the questions that head honchos really asking was - I want to cut down the cost - but other than the employee layoffs, what are other areas that I should be looking at ? Where Do I spend more ? Who is spending ? Why ? Are there alternatives to get the same things cheaper? And all these questions lead to Business intelligence Dashboards. So finally BI come to an age, entered the drawing board of C level Executives and they started looking at it seriously. So the Enterprise Performance Management - the new Avatar of Business Intelligence Dashboards - is what everybody is talking about. It all started with the financial things, as that was a priority number one - save money. Identify opportunities for potential savings. So Spend Performance Management is now a serious solution customer looks at. What's the next thing indus