The Ledger

Intelligent Technologies Are Re-shaping the Future of Business

Technology is shaping the future of how businesses operate. Digital transformation and the rise of intelligent technologies are driving business leaders to shift from managing technology to delivering more creative and strategic business outcomes. An organization’s technology vision comprises four components: the future of work, strategic technology investments, risk and resiliency, and technology operating model agility. Its approach to each of these aspects can help create an environment in which innovation grows, encourage collaboration between business and technology functions, and create sustainable competitive advantage.

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

Modern FP&A Leaders Need to Upgrade Their Playbook

“In a world of digital transformation and constant disruption, analysis must keep pace with queries that will change midstream and anticipate questions that have yet to be asked, but should be.”

 The ability to turn around insightful analysis in a timely manner is key to being seen as a modern business. To remain competitive, mature reporting processes must become more of a comprehensive playbook that provides decision makers with actionable insight in real-time. More mature processes rely less on spreadsheets, and favor purpose-built FP&A solutions that provide access to common databases, manage data scenarios and related workflows, and ensure transparency. Immature financial planning capabilities often resemble a shadow budget process, with simplistic reports, scarce analytics and a lack of business-value insights. When it comes to business planning, level of detail used must be appropriate to test a hypothesis “what if” in a way that has business relevance. Successful FP&A organizations often have the ability to provide faster and more predictive analytics, adjustments on the fly, and an emphasis on high performance through leveraging advanced analytics.

Read More at Smarter with Gartner >

How Mill Companies Use Cost Visibility to Fuel Process Optimization

The rise of digital transformation has shaken the foundation of even the most stable businesses. Like most industries, success for mill products businesses comes down to data. From manufacturing and production to finance and procurement, decision-makers must evaluate all transactional and related data to truly understand what’s going on. However, few ever truly understand how deeply the business will be affected by changes or future events as long as their accounts receivable and payable requests, shop floor and manufacturing transactions, and sales orders remain in disparate applications and organizational silos. Without an accurate view of changes in supply chain costs, raw material inventory, and order rates, decision-makers cannot safeguard top priorities such as revenue growth, optimization of operating margins, and cost reduction. Throughout mill operations, there’s always a variety of things occurring, transpiring, and transferring simultaneously. And for this reason alone, acquiring immediate insight to sense, analyze, and respond to emerging shifts should always be a priority.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

What Makes a True Data-Driven Organization?

Finance is woven into the fabric of almost everything a business does, and today’s organizations need to do more than track and control costs to be profitable. Many finance organizations that are aspiring to become more data-driven are moving forward with analytics transformation today. Those who are successful are able to leverage embedded analytics into core financial processes and empowering their finance teams with insight on demand. However, businesses that rely on spreadsheets and disparate systems for robust analytics usually hit major roadblocks, because it’s near impossible to obtain a single version of financial truth with these outdated tools. There are three essential factors that businesses must encompass to become a true data-driven organization.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >