Enterprise Transformations, It's all About Performance Management

  Chesterton and Cabrera I am a big proponent of leveraging learnings from different fields and apply them for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). In today's post, I have picked up insights from - GK Chesterton, a well-known English writer, philosopher, and critic & cognitive scientist - Derek Cabrera. For starters here are some views of Chesterton from his book "The Thing" " There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."  The simplification of anything is always sensational, and the rewa

History of ZERO-BASED Budgeting ZBB is five-decade old concept which was popularized by Pete Pyhrr when he was working as a young manager for Texas Instrument. In his words, “especially in times of economic problems, when you need to make reductions, or when you have significant and rapid technological change.” Here we break the budget down to small categories and then decisions are made on the tradeoffs of what return of investment, what do we lose, and what do we gain with the investment. It is looking at the expenses at a deeper level to derive the cost management and performance management, we are thinking about the resource allocation. In the modern world, we can do what-if and scenario analysis on aligning the resources to different priorities and ensuring they still align with higher corporate strategy and vision. Traversing in Turbulent Times We help our clients thrive in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment by empowering them with word-class perfor

“It's not going to be an easy ride, there will be rough patches, but we will get there”- said one of the project managers while explaining the benefits of a new technology implementation project kick-off meeting with VPs and C Suite leadership. A few months after project implementation, odds were in his favor, he delivered a quality product, under budget & on time! One can leverage a five-step methodology of Design, Deployment, Stabilization, Improvement, and Transformation to facilitate the expectation discussion.      Figure by: Professor  Dr. Salman A. Mufti,  Smith School of Business, Queens University Truly setting expectations on when a technology implementation will deliver results and when it will start creating impact is the key. During the design phase, most of the stakeholders are closely involved, the team is talking about the future and shaping future blueprints. This raises expectations, anticipation and magnifies the positive impact the implementat

The first major manifestation of digital technology was mainframe computers, they cost millions of dollars, and in order to use them, it required hours of training. Since then, we took a big leap from mainframes to desktops, to laptops, to smartphones, and now we have democratized technology where a majority of folks in the world have technology access.  The disruptive innovation model transforms products that are historically very expensive, complicated and makes them affordable and accessible. It helps in thinking about innovation-driven growth by keeping customers in mind, and highlighting how the progression of original innovation and disruptive innovation works. These customers range from Performance customers (who can be satisfied with the minimal viable products) to Demanding Performance Customers (who like to have the best of the experience). Disruptive innovation model helps us in answering questions like:  Why are some companies being so successful for so long? Becaus

Adopting new technology can be considered one of the pillars of progressive thinking, however, next crucial step is to effectively leverage the technology to drive value for customers, business, stakeholders, technology users and enhance their capabilities. This can be achieved by:    Choosing tech with internal/external customer focus ·     Planning effective change management to increase adoption and usage of tech through a focus on varying learning needs by a group of users such as age, preference, impact on their work etc.     Planning for lag effect and investing in building readily available resources and tools to support learning and adoption and a greater focus on users who have no willingness to adopt    Being open-minded to bring in new talent to help and support the transition From my finance transformation journeys I remember two cases of gross margin financial planning implementation where the client wanted to opt new tech to drive more efficiency and acc

Knowing enterprise planning application (ePBCS) supports many models including Financials, Workforce, Capex, Project and Strategic planning. Each of them contains some model-specific dimensions and supports 3 custom dimensions.  This will make you question the old number of dimension limits in a planning application overall, earlier this limit was 20. We put some time in exploring these limits and found that the limit is 32!. Obviously, we are not an advocate of having such a high number of dimensions, however its good to know the supported number of dimensions while designing the overall architecture considering long term strategy for the entire landscape.  We tried to tick the application by creating 30 odd custom dimensions and then initializing a module, as anticipated we got following error message: "Number of Dimensions Cannot be more than 32. Enabling the module will exceed allowed number of dimensions" Again note, these limits are at the applicatio

Out of box, EPBCS provides an option to set a monthly rolling forecast, we can enable it while creating an EPBCS planning application. Here is a little more information on that: https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/preview/pbcs_common/EPBCA/creating_the_application.htm#EPBCA-GUID-8B8D80E4-F64F-49D9-BF99-16781F6E7BA5 However, If we want to use a Quarterly rolling forecast instead of a Monthly one, there is no out of box way, but you can use a simple valid intersection to make it work, however, you have to ensure that all data forms are set to suppress on invalid data. Here is a default Scenario Year valid intersection, if you look at Rolling Forecast valid intersection it was auto-created for a valid year against a scenario for Rolling Forecast. We can add something similar to that, by bring periods in  picture as well. Data form will not suppress rows based on valid intersections automatically, please ensure suppression on invalid data is checked