The Ledger

Curated content for
analytical business leaders

Is Activity-Based Costing Worth It?

February 12, 2019

Manufacturing companies need to understand product costs accurately and in detail. This kind of information is essential for planning operations, pricing, and evaluating business margins. Activity-based costing helps manufacturers identify what products are truly profitable, the true costs of products for pricing, and what activities are driving costs. However, activity-based costing is known for being difficult to apply and labor-intensive due to the extensive data needs of the process. The trick to knowing if activity-based costing is worth the trouble is first finding a tool that can compute accurate product costs and has the capabilities to take the labor and data needs off your hands.

Read More at The Business Case >

 

Tackling Supply Chain Challenges Head On

February 11, 2019

The top three challenges most supply chains face are managing complexity, increasing agility and generating value. Managing complexity is the result of customized demand and multi-tier networks of product and service supplies. Additionally, volatile demand, fast-changing market conditions and geopolitical instability test the agility of the supply chain and exposes where it is lacking. This hinders the ability to generate value by changing the perception of the supply chain function from a cost element to a key competitive factor. Luckily there are some capabilities that can help to overcome these hurdles: visibility, collaboration, and data-driven processes. The catch is finding the right tool that can provide these capabilities while proving actionable insight.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

 

Integration is Essential for Collaborative Planning

February 7, 2019

Collaborative enterprise planning systems and techniques are being continually enhanced, because FP&A professionals now realize planning is more than just a user interacting with a single model. Collaborative planning requires an enhanced set of technologies not found in earlier planning solutions. Those solutions tended to be little more than calculation machines where data was submitted by users through a standard template and consolidated through the organization’s business hierarchies, with a set of results produced for senior management to review. Many of these capabilities are still required, but by themselves are not enough to support true collaborative planning. To be effective, collaborative planning systems must integrate a number of technologies that together form the basis of a solution.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

 

Facilitating Powerful Analytics in a Data-Driven Culture

February 6, 2019

Demand for advanced analytics is increasing, and so is the expectation that management accountants will perform the analytics. Finance leaders want a data-driven culture to maximize the value of data through analytics. Specifically, they aim to make business decisions faster and more accurately through automation and predictive modeling. Trust in data analytics is the foundation of a data-driven culture. Fortunately, progression through the stages of analytics maturity also builds a foundation of trust, and eventually business decision makers gain enough confidence in predictive models to let the models themselves make the decisions

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >

 

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