The Ledger

Step Aside Traditional ERPs – Enterprise Technology is Driving Success in 2019

“Traditional ERP implementations are increasingly giving way to full-blow digital transformation efforts.”

In 2019, traditional ERP implementations will become increasingly obsolete, and more companies will find success by broadening their view of enterprise technology. Instead of viewing ERP implementations as a way to automate back-office functions or to automate already-inefficient business processes, more technologically innovative organizations will find success by breaking with the status quo. For example, more forward-leaning organizations are finding success focusing on true digital transformations vs. traditional ERP implementations, which is the wave of the future. As a result, traditional implementations will continue to fade in 2019.

Read More at CFO Magazine >

Turning Digital Finance Transformation Vision into Reality

A recent interview published in The WSJ with Deloitte’s CFO, Pete Shimer, examines the CFO’s role in a global finance transformation. He says, “The opportunities and challenges of digital transformation in finance are relatively common across large, global enterprises. However, the difference between struggle and success may result as much from a CFO’s ability to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders as from the technical skills needed to move finance into the digital world.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

Train Your Supply Chain to be Dynamic

The very nature of the supply chain is that it’s constantly subject to change, whether that change comes internally (new products, new technology, new management) or externally (regulations, disruptions, competition). There’s also now compelling evidence that the workforce itself is being changed by this continuous influx of new-ness. Due to the shift in consumer buying habits to an omni-channel/”always-on” model focused on immediate gratification, shippers find themselves stretched in every direction. They recognize the need for greater agility, but many haven’t made the required changes to improve their agility over the past five years.

Read More at MH&L >

Leave Excel Limitations in 2018

Despite the limitations and lack of flexibility of Excel, it is still the main tool used by FP&A departments for analyzing and reporting data. Excel is a familiar platform that is easy to use, cost friendly, and comes with many formatting and graphing capabilities. However, the negatives far outweigh the positives when using Excel for data analytics. With Excel, calculations are made in reference to their position on a grid. In a modern solution, calculations are named and thus are always applied to the right data. This makes the calculations easy to set up and manage, while with Excel you can only hope the right data is being accessed. In addition, Excel has limitations when being used for data modeling, reporting and data analytics, and combining data from disparate systems. To get users to give up their spreadsheets requires showing them that there is a far better, faster alternative that is secure and doesn’t have the inherent integrity issues.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >