The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
FP&A Trends: My Top Five Predictive Planning Lessons
March 4, 2022
“Ask people what predictive analytics is about – they might mention a crystal ball or sci-fi novels. In practice predictive analytics has nothing to do with black magic or rocket science. It is a proven and robust technology, based on math, that can bring concrete benefits to finance organisations, when rightly used.”
SF Magazine: ABC and Value-Stream Costing in Tandem
March 1, 2022
“Like in most areas of life, it’s generally good to have a lot of choices in accounting. Take, for instance, activity-based costing (ABC) and value-stream costing (VSC), which can be viewed as two alternative approaches to obtaining accurate cost information in complex production and sales environments. You would think that companies that adopt VSC aren’t likely to also have ABC systems. But that isn’t necessarily the case: A 2012 survey of 368 facilities employing Lean production found that 62 of them—or roughly one in six—reported a relatively high use of both ABC and VSC. Those same companies also reported the highest level of performance improvement from Lean initiatives. Clearly, these organizations weren’t treating ABC and VSC as alternatives: They were using the systems in tandem.”
CFO Magazine: 4 Tips for Cutting Indirect Spend
March 1, 2022
“In light of price inflation, companies are weighing their options for cost transformation, said Mahoney. Cost transformation is about simplifying and refocusing the organization. It involves a soup-to-nuts analysis of any action taken by a company and deciding: Is this something we should build? Is this something we should deliver internally, or does it make more sense to buy or outsource to an external supplier?”
Harvard Business Review: Why Becoming a Data-Driven Organization Is So Hard
February 24, 2022
“Right now, the biggest challenge for organizations working on their data strategy might not have to do with technology at all. In the latest NewVantage Partners annual survey, which tracks the progress of corporate data initiatives, corporate chief data, information, and analytics executives reported that cultural change is the most critical business imperative.”
