The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Finance Teams are Becoming Quantitative Analysts
November 14, 2017
Finance is becoming a hub of quantitative analysis and data preservation. We are in the era of Big Data where billions of devices are emitting data across the globe every day, to the point where the global supply chain is radically transparent. This flood of unstructured data is made comprehensible by new analytic tools. New predictive modeling applications with user-friendly interfaces enables businesses to integrate data from disparate systems to get better insights into their business. While the new analytic tools are intuitive for data exploration and self-service reporting, statisticians and data scientists are joining finance to help develop hypotheses and interpret data sets for new insights.
Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >
Do You Have a Data Quality Problem?
November 13, 2017
Decision makers, leaders, data scientists, and managers often must make quick assessments about whether they can trust a set of data whether they can include it in an analysis, or whether they need it to take a new direction. This all boils down to the need to investigate the quality of your data. There are four steps you can take to assess your data quality and identify where you should target your efforts to improve it.
Read More at The Harvard Business Review >
A Successful Strategy Is a Balancing Act
November 9, 2017
It is very common for a company to be so immersed in executing its strategy that it lost sight of its purpose. To ensure that your company is focusing on the purpose, you must put your strategy on the back-burner until you are sure it will help fulfill your purpose. Strategies are time-bound and target specific results. Your purpose, in contrast, is what makes you durably relevant to the world. Strategy is but one of several important means to put your purpose in motion. Intrinsic human connection to your purpose is even more important.
Read More at The Harvard Business Review >
The Steel Industry Needs Real-Time Cost Visibility to Thrive
November 8, 2017
Steel companies everywhere are facing a slow growing business environment as a result of continued volatility and dynamics in the world economies, driven in part by the end of China’s rapid economic growth cycle as well as changes in commodity prices and increasing regulations. In today’s increasingly competitive markets it is also critical that steel companies have a firm grasp on their real cost-to-serve customers. Often companies lack a systematic management process around their annual budgetary calculation of production costs; therefore, the insights gained from variance analyses using standard costs are not consistent across business units and only allow limited insights into past business performance. A structured approach to product costing can help steel businesses better navigate the challenges facing them.
