About UsThe Decision Factor offers insightful comments and observations on analytics—from views on new technology approaches and market dynamics to the latest industry trends driving demand for faster, smarter information analysis. This blog contains personal views, thoughts, and opinions from SAP employees, mentors, and friends working in the area of analytics. It’s not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute an official communication of SAP. |
Posted by: Malcolm Faulkner June 11, 2013  Debate will rage as to the longevity of the current low-growth, high-unemployment economic volatility and whether it’s really a “new normal,” or even if it’s really all that new. In fact, there’s nothing new at all about financial turmoil, and it’s been happening for centuries (see, “This Time is Different” from the Princeton University Press). What is likely is that there will be less time between these ups and downs—volatility will be the more normal.
Sustainability and technology are two …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Pras Chatterjee May 28, 2013  In my last blog, Integrated Business Planning— the Inevitable Journey for Finance, I discussed the many challenges that are driving companies to pursue Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Today, I want to discuss the solutions that IBP offers, and how you can get started with IBP within your organization.
IBP Offers Solutions to Business Planning Challenges
Business planning challenges are driving companies to start pursuing IBP. Some of the ways that companies can use IBP to address these challenges are:
…
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Pras Chatterjee May 14, 2013  It should come as no surprise that the next mile of finance is upon us – changes are afoot in the world of budgeting and forecasting. Traditionally, this has entailed the finance organization accumulating information at a high level of aggregation from their business partners (sales, HR, marketing) and other cost and responsibility centers. This information feeds into budgeting, forecasting, and strategic planning models with most of the emphasis on revenues and expenses. But many of these models lack collaboration, clarity, and timeliness. In …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Karuna Mukherjea March 21, 2013 
Recently, I walked into a family owned coffee shop and ordered my latte. It was a very pleasant experience, but it was also atypical—the sweet lady took my order on an iPad and asked if she could enter in my e-mail address so they could send me a survey link and periodic e-mails. As a technology user and evangelist, I agreed without any hesitation.
Intrigued by this experience, I wondered why this small coffee shop was adopting a mobile-based system …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Richard Barrett February 14, 2013  To find out how some companies have thrived during the last five years of difficult trading conditions while other have simply languished, Ernst & Young commissioned a research project that during the last five years has surveyed about 1,500 senior executives. Their report – Growing Beyond: How high performers are accelerating ahead – is now available and has some valuable insights for Finance.
The study compared the relative high and low performance in various sectors based on EBITDA and revenue growth over …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Andy Hirst August 14, 2012  Recent articles on ING agreeing to pay a >$619-million fine and HSBC facing over $1-billion fine have put anti-money laundering and compliance back into the limelight. These fines are mind bogging in size and reflect that although millions have been spent on technology in this area, they’re not fixing the problem.
What Are the Problems?
Ever-increasing compliance data is becoming a big data problem, requiring new approaches to sift through the information and the erroneous activity Latency must be replaced with more real-time …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Malcolm Faulkner July 24, 2012  Corporate performance is measured in financial years. However, strategic plans more often span multiple years while containing shorter-term targets that map to the performance sought in the current financial year. The development of a long-term strategy might take anywhere from six to nine months for a large enterprise. Once in place, the annual planning that precedes each financial year is a much–shorter, affair (one to two months).
Regardless of whether we’re embarking on a new strategy or tweaking an existing one, the lifecycle looks much the same. There are essentially three …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Richard Barrett April 26, 2012 This article originally appeared on CFO Knowledge and has been republished with permission.
Many years ago I once shared an office with group of high-testosterone young management accountants and a solitary middle-aged female internal auditor. She must have dreaded coming to work, not knowing what tales she would over hear from her cubicle in the corner. She was a pleasant enough person, but my suspicion is she was passed over for promotion a few times and put out to grass in internal audit. In my experience, it’s a …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Decision Factor May 5, 2011 If business analytics and finance are topics that interest you, you should check out one of our sister blogs: CFO Knowledge. They post some great thought leadership pieces focused on the role of financial professionals today.
A recent post on in-memory computing offers an interesting take on how finance can best make use of in-memory. For Richard Barrett, the author, one of the priority areas is cost and profitability reporting. But he also reveals he’s less convinced about in-memory’s uses for financial budgeting applications where the critical path is speed and …
Read the rest of this entry
Posted by: Sonny Dasgupta April 28, 2011  There is a saying in India: Never let your feet run faster than your shoes, which my grandfather was fond of cautioning me with whenever my youthful plans got too ambitious to execute.
I’m reminded of that saying lately as I think about the demand for data acceleration.
Organizations must deal with ever-increasing volumes of transactions and information – often thousands of transactions a second, 24 hours a day.
Any time you have such a high volume, there is an inherent risk, especially in a more strictly …
Read the rest of this entry
|
