Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

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...

I compared the “Data Management” with a story of Elephant and Seven Blind Men in my last blog post http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-elephant-seven-blind-men.html . I promised to start writing my views about the issues that I heard so far from my customers, consultants and product companies that I worked with. The first issue is confusion with the whole terminology. This seems very basic thing but if all stakeholders in this value chain are not talking same language, same terms with same meaning the initiative is doomed to fail. 5 years back in 2007, when I was working on evaluating a “data mapper” product for a company in California – I realized how complex a terminolgy issue can be. I was at their office for 2 days, going through product screens, meeting high value real architects. The product was really good, nice UI, good functionality – but less appeal in the market. I was talking to marketing head, and he said – Prashant ask me questions about...