The Ledger

Agility and Integrated Analytics Are Essential to a Scalable Business

Businesses today that strive to get ahead of their competition need to have smarter, faster, collaborative and innovative systems that enable agility and advanced analytics. These organizations need a vision and strategy to define the future digital business state. It’s what aligns people in the organization on the priorities, capabilities, and collaboration required to successfully remove legacy business models and operations. For a business to successfully transform from today’s legacy products and business models to tomorrow’s scalable digital businesses, leaders need the ability to integrate external data sources. Adopting multi-disciplinary agile practices and making internal and external data available for decision making are two of the steps to driving digital core organizations. The most important step is changing the culture.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Are You Benefiting from Your Cost Accounting Tools?

Companies that still rely on their legacy costing systems are putting themselves at more of a disadvantage then they probably realize.

 “Many manufacturers have developed overhead rates that are being used long after their “best if used by” dates. The reasons for this include the thought that inflation isn’t all that significant, so how much different can the rate be from last year, and besides it’s so much work to update the rate. After a while, you find the rate hasn’t been updated in a few years and then your costing system has slid into ineffectiveness. Also, cost drivers tend to not be examined that often. Some manufacturers have always used labor hours as cost drivers, so they do not even consider that the significant capital expenditures they have made in the business make the more plausible cost driver machine hours. In standard costing systems, standards are sometimes not updated as often as they should be for some of the same reasons.”

The result of inaccurate cost accounting systems can lead to investing time and effort into products or customers that are either marginally profitable, or actually unprofitable.

Read More at The Bonadio Group >

Smart Businesses Plan For the Future

Most CFOs have been trained to focus on the past, with historical reporting and benchmarking at the heart of their mission. But as competitive pressures accelerate, they’re increasingly expected to help shape the future too. The businesses that will sprint ahead of the competition in the future are the ones who are actively preparing for events to come through scenario planning today. Proper scenario planning ensures that today’s growing companies are prepared for any conceivable future. Finance teams need the ability to confidently and accurately predict the impact of internal and external changes on the business, enabling the business to be proactive, rather than reactive.

Read More at Industry Week >

New Research Proves Cost Management is Still a Global Imperative

In today’s increasingly digital world, businesses recognize the need to transform their operations and capabilities by adopting more integrated and dynamic technologies. Deloitte recently released their 2019 Global Cost Survey, and the findings show that cost reduction and cost management remains a top priority for businesses worldwide. “By harnessing the power of digital technology to streamline their cost structures and generate cost savings, companies can take full advantage of the latest digital innovations — becoming the disrupters, rather than the disrupted.” – Omar Aguilar, principal and global strategic cost transformation leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP. We all know there are only two ways to grow profits – generate more revenue or reduce costs. Investing in technology to drive down costs is important – but investing in technology to understand the true drivers of cost in your organization is equally important.

Read the full report at Deloitte >