Advanced Technology Platforms Are Driving Finance Transformation

“Historically, ERP systems were implemented every 5 to 10 years and upgrades were made every year or so. With digital transformation, multiple software platforms interact with each other and constantly change the environment, the spend, and the ROI.” – Chris Stephenson, Business Consulting Principal at Grant Thornton

CFOs need to find a way to reduce costs and increase productivity, while increasing customer satisfaction and other valuable intangibles. This can be accomplished by understanding the robust nature of integrated technologies and knowing which one is best suited for the business.

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A Modern Data Analytics Platform Can Save Your Business From Extinction

 “IDC recently made a bold prediction: 75% of organizations will become completely digitally transformed by 2027, and the rest will go out of business. Why? Successful digital transformation allows businesses to operate with a level of agility necessary to adapt to a marketplace that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.”

Increasingly, the growth of midsize businesses depends on the strength of a unified modern data platform, which is critical for turning data into insight. IT leaders must create a trusted foundation of connected, real-time data that is carefully and faithfully governed, orchestrated, and made accessible business-wide. Furthermore, the infrastructure, tools, and services supporting this platform must be flexible and agile enough to immediately address shifting customer demand, increasing disruption, and evolving market dynamics. 

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Are You Relying on The Best Tools to Make Important Business Decisions?

Business leaders need an advanced tool to gain important insights into their business. However, implementing a new technology is only part of the solution, rather than the complete answer to their business challenges. When applying a new technology tool, it is important to integrate it with their organization’s business processes and data management so they can ensure the validity of their analytics. Applying a new IT tool might lead to doing something better than it was being done before, but that might not be the right thing to do. By adding effectiveness at the beginning of the solution, then the right thing will be done, with the right tools, in the right way. Before relying on a new technology for making business decisions, it is important that you can first answer the questions, “why use this tool?” And “how can I best use this tool?”

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New Priorities in the Consumer Goods Marketplace

Consumers have completely changed the way they shop, and it is up to the consumer goods industry to adapt. Today’s consumers expect their consumer goods brands to provide the products, services, and experiences that meet their individual needs at just the right moment. However, the traditional operating models simply weren’t designed for this level of complexity. To be successful, brands must pivot to operating models that can deliver consumer relevance and capture new growth opportunities in a highly complex, uncertain, and ever-changing consumer goods marketplace.

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Becoming an Intelligent Enterprise: What’s the Rush?

The buzz about intelligent technologies is getting louder, and every day we see proof of how these technologies are dictation the future success of every business. In most cases, industry experts warn that companies will wither without advancing data-driven automation and decision-making.

In its “Technology Vision 2018” report, Accenture observes, “Businesses depend on technology-based partnerships for growth, but their own legacy systems aren’t designed to support partnerships at scale. To fully power the connected intelligent enterprise, companies must first re-architect themselves.”

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Achieving an Agile Business in Two Steps

Finance leaders strive to simplify their business planning and amplify the transfer of knowledge across the organization. The business market rewards agility, while it punishes companies that are too slow and myopic to see what’s coming and to act before they suffer serious consequences. In an era where tomorrow may not look anything like today, agility may well be the defining characteristic of success. It’s not just about responding. It’s about responding in a way that produces the outcome your board, shareholders, employees, and customers will see as successful. What can a business do to attain agility? The answer is two-fold.

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External Data Can Boost the Value of Your Analytics

Today’s business atmosphere requires companies to not only advance their data analytics capabilities, but to also master the process. To boost the business value of their companies’ analytics efforts, leaders can adopt key practices to navigate the complexity of third-party data. Companies know they can gain valuable insights by analyzing the data they generate from their operations. But internally generated information can leave gaps, and companies are increasingly moving to incorporate new, nontraditional, and external sources of data into their analyses.

Read More at Deloitte Insights >

Manufacturers Are Shifting from Being Preventative to Predictive

For many manufacturers today, the focus of their business is not so much producing products for sale as it is delivering better business outcomes for their customers through asset-as-a-service offerings. Leading organizations use an intelligence-based approach, where maintenance teams monitor conditions in real time using an enterprise asset management tool. For asset manufacturers, real-time analytics and predictive maintenance create the opportunity for entirely new business models. In the past, manufacturers made the assets and customers operated them. Today, these boundaries are blurring as manufacturers leverage new asset-as-a-service business models and deliver outcomes rather than just the physical assets.

Read More at Forbes Magazine >

Dynamic Technologies Have Become Necessary to Remain Competitive

Dynamic technologies provide businesses the opportunity to elevate their ability to make decisions, deliver outcomes, and complete tasks in a more human way. For growing companies, this is the time to push past the boundaries of traditional decision-making capabilities to intrinsic intelligence that is trusted, real-time, accurate, and continuously learning. Advanced technologies can empower businesses to overcome the challenges of limited technology procurement budgets and siloed legacy applications. Because of this, robust technologies that provide actionable insights across the enterprise have become necessities and enablers of significant competitive advantage.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >