The Ledger

Advanced Visibility and Collaboration Creates Efficient Manufacturing Processes

In today’s competitive environment, companies are always looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition and improve the customer experience. For machinery, equipment, and asset manufacturers, this often starts with developing smarter products to capture more information about how they are operating and performing around the globe. A large German machinery manufacturer found that as their global customer base grew, they needed to find a way to improve transparency across their products, while improving visibility and transparency into pump and component details globally. By leveraging a technology that promoted company-wide collaboration and visibility, they were able to become more efficient and reduce overall risks of their business.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

New Priorities For Modern Cost Management

According to Deloitte’s global cost management survey, cost reduction is now a global imperative, with 86% of global respondents saying their companies are likely to undertake cost reduction initiatives over the next 24 months. Cost management ha become a strategic enabler with the power to disrupt entire industries and fundamentally change how companies do business and remain competitive. To help avoid falling behind, companies in every part of the world should understand the potential impact of digital so they can position themselves to capitalize on the opportunities, particularly regarding automation, analytics and cognitive technology. Now we are seeing the rise of advanced, next-generation cost management solutions that harness the power of digital technologies to dramatically improve efficiency and effectiveness, and to enable fundamentally new business models and new ways of working.

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

Six Elements of a Robust Business Analytics Platform

 “As companies face a thinning margin for decision error, the ability to use business analytics effectively—everything from correlation, segmentation, clustering, regression analysis, as well as forecasting and predicting outcomes—is becoming mission-critical.”

There is a strong need for business leaders to gain insights, foresight and inferences from their data. However, with the amount of data they are managing, they need a business analytics tool with visualization to quickly gain real-time insights. So, how do you know what software tool is right for your business. There are six key components that, when embedded with analytics, provide powerful decision support.

Read More at The Journal of Accountancy >

Breaking Down the Barriers of Personalized Cost Visibility in Manufacturing

Customers are ever-evolving and gravitating towards more personalized products that meet their unique specifications. For manufacturers, meeting this demand for high-quality individualized goods is nearly impossible to do in a cost-efficient manner with outdated operational processes based on yesterday’s technology. Therefore, organizations are looking to transform their facilities into open integrated factories – the kind that enable the visibility and flexibility needed to make their customers’ personalization dreams come true. By adopting integrated and dynamic technologies, manufacturers can break down these barriers, connect their processes, and achieve a unified view of the essential information required to improve production performance.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Is Cost-Plus Pricing Right for Your Business?

The idea behind cost-plus pricing is simple: the seller calculates all costs (fixed and variable) incurred in manufacturing the product, then applies a markup percentage to these costs to estimate the asking price. This method can lead to powerful differentiation, greater customer trust, reduced risk of price wars, and steady, predictable profits for the company. It is essentially the opposite of value-based pricing, where prices are customized based on their target customer. Every businesses’ goal is to reduce costs, increase profits and retain customers, and the way a business prices its products can have a major effect on that.

Read More at The Harvard Business Review >