The Rise of Financial Analytics in Enterprise Strategy

With the rise of analytics, in many organizations Finance is expanding its role, providing increasing value in other functional areas and looking for ways to deliver greater value as a business function. Nowadays Finance has become the enabler of analytics and decision support. The reasons are simple: as the economy evolves, Finance data is rapidly being deployed outside its traditional scope. Finance also has an ability to apply analytics above and beyond traditional delivery channels.

Leave a commentFinance

DIY Business Process Applications: Wish vs. Reality

BPM systems are highly demanding in terms of scalability, traceability, serviceability and security. This results in a plethora of technical questions and requirements which simply ask too much of a typical business division. Why should a business user concern himself in detail with these sorts of questions, given that solving the problems they raise frequently extends far beyond his area of influence?

Leave a commentBiz Intelligence

Fixing Finance with CPM

A recent article in CFO magazine (Fixing Finance: Work in Progress, March 27, 2014) discusses the great improvement in productivity and cost savings that finance departments have made over the past 15 years. Despite this great improvement 81% of the finance executives surveyed said they were “seriously committed” to more efficiency and effectiveness.

Leave a commentFinance

Happy 100th Birthday, Ford Assembly Line!

When Henry Ford began making cars in the early 1900s, “state-of-the-art” manufacturing meant car bodies delivered by horse-drawn carriage, with teams of workers assembling automobiles atop sawhorses. The teams would rotate from one station to another, doing their part to bring the vehicle together. Parts deliveries were timed, but often ran late causing pile-ups of workers vying for space and delays in production. Fortunately for the future of industry, these archaic practices came to an end Oct. 7, 1913. …

Leave a commentFYI, Management

How to Harness the Power of Process Innovation

All employees need to feel that it is part of their job to constantly come up with new ways of doing things to make them better so that process innovation becomes just a way of doing business.

So how can you achieve this? Innovation must become a core part of your leadership agenda. Training employees on how to innovate processes becomes the vehicle through which you can spread the methods and ways of thinking. Then the corporate culture must continue to reinforce the message. On a practical level, maybe this means starting each day with a discussion of what we could do better.

Leave a commentManagement

The Secret Life of Garbage

I was recently sent a fantastic infographic called “The Secret Life of Garbage” which explains what happens in the end to end process of garbage collection, recycling and disposal. I’ve embedded the infographic below.

Co-incidentally I’ve just finished an assignment with a waste management client so I thought I’d share a few insights into the process.

Leave a commentFYI

The Straw Point: How Process Can Win or Lose Customers

In every process we have customer interaction points - how well we manage these “moments of truth” with our customers influences their levels of loyalty towards the firm. Loyal customers spend more and are more likely to recommend the firm to friends or collegues so making customers more loyal should be a major focus – and to do this we need to look at process from a customer experience perspective. How should we do this?

Leave a commentUncategorized

Process Glue – Explaining the Benefits of a BPMS

I like to think of a BPMS as process glue. Organisations will always have manual processes and disparate systems. These are the areas where work slips through the cracks, where time is lost, where customers are forgotten. A BPMS helps glue the process together. It provides process visibility, it stops the errors, it speeds the process up, it kills manual work, it provides meaningful data, it gives the customers what they need…(if the process is optimised first!)

1 CommentManagement

Joining All BPM Methods Together – Is That Even Possible?

It is difficult for consultants to market and sell a comprehensive BPM solution because we are often dealing with organizations that seek to play one BPM approach against another. Customers are confused how is your BPM approach different from Lean or 6Sigma, and why should they use BPM at all. It is many times difficult to explain that BPM is a more comprehensive approach to process improvement than any single method and it is focused on integrating, aligning, managing and measuring all of an organization’s business processes and that Business Process Management includes the application of all the other available methods, where, when and how they are appropriate. BPM is an approach that is inclusive, not exclusive, of other approaches. So, it is not BPM against Six Sigma, Lean or any other but it is BPM with all the previously mentioned methods.

3 CommentsFinance

Is ERP a Ready Made Meal in the Supermarket of Process?

There’s still a great appetite for ERP tools despite the fact that they’ve been around for quite some time. To me an ERP system is like a ready made meal - packaged, pre-processed and on the outside quite a nice idea. The idea behind ERP is that you have a bunch of processes that support key organisational capabilities built into an integrated software system. It’s a fix, but it doesn’t fix everything - there are always processes that need to be changed and gaps that need to be filled.

Leave a commentTech