The Ledger

The Path to Manufacturing Innovation is Paved With Exponential Technologies

“The velocity of technology advancement, especially for the manufacturing industry, is exponential.”

Exponential technologies provide the scalability that modern businesses often lack with their legacy technologies and outdated practices. Industrial manufacturers are focusing on these technologies as a foundational approach to innovation across both products and processes. In this era of rapidly accelerating transformation, organizations of all types must develop the ability to innovate rapidly, or get left behind by the competition. Today’s manufacturing is focused on technology-driven innovation that enables businesses to build new capabilities and develop new products and services. Exponential technologies have the capability to optimize processes and controls across production and operations, providing manufacturers with a major advantage.

Read More from Deloitte Insights >

7 Fundamentals of a Successful Costing Methodology

For many businesses, spreadsheets are a large part of their costing reality and have proven to do more harm than good when it comes to truly understanding business performance. Establishing a robust costing process doesn’t have to depend on spreadsheets or rigid ERP cost modules. With an integrated costing analytics tool, finance leaders can get access to accurate and actionable performance insights for meaningful business decisions. There are seven areas to consider when establishing a dynamic costing process in your organization.

Read More on Linkedin >

Intelligent Scenario Planning with Advanced Analytics

Nobody understands Robert Burns’ quote, “The best laid plans often go awry,” like modern business leaders. When it comes to financial planning, finance teams need the ability to assess and adjust plans when they go off course. Intelligent planning starts with analysis of past results to help determine where is business is going, and measure future success. However, most planning processes are tangled in static spreadsheet processes that are error prone and limit agility. Modern businesses are leveraging intelligent technologies that provide the most up-to-date insight by analyzing the actual data being used by the systems of record. This enables users to react to analytic results in the context of their business process or workflow by creating scenarios that provide the insight to make strategic decisions.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Success is Utilizing the Right Data – Not Just Owning It

“No matter how much data is fed to machine learning and predictive analytics tools, the key is deciding which outputs are useful and how to act on them.”

When it comes to implementing new technologies, many businesses go through what Gartner calls a “hype cycle”- where the initial implementation is a period of inflated expectations that  becomes a “slope of enlightenment” once people begin to find practical uses for the technology, and finally develops into an extended “plateau of productivity”, where the actual value of the tool is realized. Today, technology itself will not provide a competitive advantage. How a business leverages their tools to gain meaningful business insight and what they do with that knowledge will define their success. With the rise of digital transformation and innovation, beating out competitors will come down to visibility, judgement, knowledge, strategy and approach.

Read More at CFO Magazine >