The Ledger

Boosting Business Performance With Insight & Analytic Teams

” Data analytics initiatives can help businesses increase revenues, improve operational efficiency, optimize marketing campaigns and customer service efforts, respond more quickly to emerging market trends, and gain an important competitive edge over rivals—all with the ultimate goal of boosting business performance. Depending on the application, the data that’s analyzed can consist of either historical records or new information that has been processed for real-time analytics uses. In addition, it can come from a mix of internal systems and external data sources, and now, we can add increasingly accurate predictive capabilities into the mix.”

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Increased Profit Margins Aren’t Always Good

The ultimate goal of every business is to make a profit. To do this, they spend a lot of time on cost cutting initiatives and increasing prices to improve their profit margins. But at some point, cost cutting can become counterproductive because it hinders growth and undermines performance in the long run. It turns out there are limits to how much — or how long — companies can improve their profit margins. Fortunately, a few straightforward rules of thumb can help managers avoid taking margin improvements too far, such as focusing on customers and competitors.

Read More at CFO Magazine >

Adding Value to Your Budget

“A solid budget generally includes a macroeconomic forecast for the upcoming year; a description of the business outlook; revenue forecasts by business segments, geography, product lines, and so forth; and pro-forma financial statements, including estimates for the current year, projections for the upcoming year, and comparative numbers from previous years.”

The budgeting process in any organization is critical. Because of how important budgets are to the success of the business, creating a more accurate and reliable budget would provide added value to the process. Two additional pieces could be added to the budget package to improve the quality of the budget numbers and to help explain the rationale behind the numbers: organic and inorganic growth, and capacity costs.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >

Reimagining the Financial Services Industry with Strategy

The financial services industry is changing rapidly, and conditions are becoming more challenging than ever. Competition is not only coming from peers, but also from nontraditional new entrants, such as financial technology firms. To become more agile, traditional financial services companies need to re-imagine the way they run their businesses. This will require includes continually reshaping their business models and being able to measure, analyze, and evaluate the financial impact to meet the demands of a new digital organization.This shift in the role of finance can be achieved only when the organization transforms and redefines itself, and adopts the right technology as the foundation for executing a smart digital operation.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >