Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

 Original Blog post - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-ii-prashant-mendki Procurement transformation journey is complex, cross functional, time consuming and even frustrating at times. The very basic but a strategic step to start this journey is “Spend Analysis”. Again – this has to be done in a right way to get the potential benefits. We talked about that in first part of this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-i-prashant-mendki By definition – Spend Analysis is an analysis of your spend (invoice paid), what items you are spending on (product), who you are paying to (supplier). It looks really simple – no? When I worked with one of the large Media Entertainment company few years back, they had thousands of suppliers, millions of transactions, good amount of Maverick spend. It’s a global business with more than $2Bn in Spend, 12 different global systems. Thousands of trans...

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...

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...

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 web...

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...

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...

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...

In the weeks since SAP wrapped up its acquisition of Ariba, there has been a lot of discussion about how the Ariba products and technologies will be delivered to the SAP installed base. There was some information announced at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, but SAP users want to know more. To help us better understand this, I recently spoke with Prashant Mendki, a consultant and SAP mentor ( @pmendki ) specializing in procurement. Following is a transcript of our interview. What have you heard from SAP procurement users since the acquisition of Ariba was announced? Have they been enthusiastic, cautious, surprised, not surprised? As with many large mergers, the users I heard from were cautious. SAP and Ariba were competitors in the procurement market – especially in a supplier network area – so most of the users are looking for information on what will be done in areas of functionality overlap and products that offer the same or similar functionality. There a...

I have 2 SAP systems and I want to fix my material master, Services Master. I want all that data to be clean, standardized, classified, enriched and load it back to my SAP in next 6 months. What do you suggest ? Chris - one of my key client was explaining during a “solution understanding” call. My sales manager Tom, enthusiastically started talking about new version of the MDM platform by ERP company, tools, technologies, product landscape, licenses etc. After 30 minutes of sales pitch, I could see confusion on Chris’s face clearly. He said - but I don’t want to add any new product in my infrastructure for all this. Can you just implement MDM for me without I adding any new software ?   Both are using MDM implementation as a keyword, but in a completely different context. Chris wants to implement MDM as a process while Tom was trying to sell MDM as a new software. Whats the difference ? Lot I will say. MDM as a product – when you sell a   software license to a...

"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...

As a third step in my Data Management article series – lets look at commonly used terminology in the domain. Now these are very standard definitions I am quoting from a standard available glossary. The next step – next article would be to explain the relevance and usage of these terminology in business world. E.g. How to look at data standardization in supplier data context or material data context – when it comes to optimizing your procurement processes. That’s next. In my first article in this data management series –I compared data management with the story of elephant and seven blind men. http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-elephant-seven-blind-men.html The second post is more about – why its important to speak same language when you are running any data management initiative.   http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-are-we-all-speaking.html Data analysis : Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transfo...