1) Efficiency. The use of a purpose built, multi access budgeting database will automate consolidation of budgets, automate reporting and planning and automate integration to source systems. By automating these processes you can reduce or eliminate large numbers of manual tasks in Excel. This factor alone is often enough to justify a project for some organisations.

2) Non-financial planning drivers. The use of parameters or budgeting assumptions will automatically create a number of budget lines. An everyday example is how planning headcount and grade will drive the payroll accounts in the general ledger such as wages, tax, superannuation. Imagine also being able to produce your P&L down to the gross profit line using only non-financial drivers.

3) Business intelligence. Some budgeting products offer BI and reporting capability all in one. This means it doubles up and replaces a number of ad hoc and reporting currently handled with older and limited reporting products such as Crystal. Not only that but many of the best budgeting systems will have dashboards and KPI reports built-in. Imagine the value of having a single powerful reporting product rather than a number of different systems?

4) Confidence. Many companies are unable to provide the information requested by senior management in a timely manner and with a degree of confidence. Or if you do provide an answer with a reasonable degree of accuracy, it takes so long to provide that the data is already dated. Not easy to account for in an ROI, but if you provide an answer with clear assumptions, your senior managers will thank you for it when it is their head on the block.

5) Accountability. When budgeting and forecasting is a self-service, easy to deploy process, there is no blame game, “they’re not my numbers”. While it is difficult to apply an ROI to this it will certainly result in a more aligned organisation.

6) Business modelling. A fully featured budgeting system will allow you to provide not just one answer, ie the budget, but a range of answers and options with key assumptions built in. People like to have choice. Imagine going to senior management with three or five budgets where they can decide on the most likely scenario to go with as the main annual plan. This is true decision support. How much value can you put on a good decision?

7) Poor financial systems. A good budgeting system can make up for the inadequacies of a finance system. Many tasks such as reallocations of cost are better managed outside of the world of debits and credits, resulting in reporting with a real basis of preparation of your management reports. You will also be able to generate reports from your financial systems with ad hoc analysis to drill down to the underlying numbers.

8) Strategic alignment. It may sound like a lofty goal but with a broad featured budgeting system, it becomes far easier to implement and track strategic initiatives. This results in real savings to the bottom line.

So if you thought budgeting was just about replacing Excel and speeding things up, this could be just the start of things that a combined budgeting and BI platform can do for your business. How do you put a value on it? It’s not easy. There are possibly efficiency savings alone which can justify a project. However if you can talk persuasively to senior management with a focus on meeting the objectives of the business and what it means for them, you will find a project far easier to justify and do great things for your career as well!

Wanting to streamline your budgeting and forecasting? Register for our free seminar here.

In CIO magazine, Gartner predicted that by 2017, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are anticipated to spend more on IT projects than the Chief Information Officer (CIO). There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, CMOs place their focus on measurable business outcomes such as return on investment (ROI) and as a result, marketers are not only expected to be innovative, but also to leverage analytics to refine marketing efforts. Secondly, more and more organisations are now seeing marketing as a revenue centre rather than a cost centre.

In simple terms, it’s all about the ability to study and leverage information about your target market, to deliver truly personalised content and tracking your prospects through their buying journey, until they’re ready to buy.

The more you know about your prospects’ buying behaviour, the better you can nurture your leads to take them through to conversion.

Your insights into your target markets combined with the technologies and tools now available, marketing departments can track almost everything: emails, website landing pages, web form captures, social media activities, call-to-actions, click-through rates, blogs, lead scoring, surveys and more.

All this data highlights the importance of usable marketing data and analytics.

Marketing analytics is a discipline and one that is becoming increasingly relied upon to inform the best possible business decisions. It’s a set of processes and technologies that allow marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing efforts by analysing key business metrics such as the effectiveness of campaigns, the return on investment (ROI) and the overall effects on the business as a whole.

Marketing Sherpa recently published some research they conducted into  marketing analytics challenges, asking marketers about the types of challenges they had faced in 2012. The results from the survey showed the top three challenges in order of importance were:

1. Acting on data to improve marketing effectiveness
2. Combining data from multiple sources to draw correlations and make predictions
3. Funding new analytics tools and solutions

These findings highlight why marketing departments need to overcome functional silos. It is essential that your marketing department has a single view of its performance to see exactly what’s working, and what’s not, and move away from the siloing of data in multiple or disconnected systems. This is the main reason why companies end up making business decisions based on gut feel instead of facts.

Other factors highlighting the need for accurate and integrated analytics is the number of marketing channels available to us today, and the need to control the marketing budget and spend. The question you probably ask yourself on a regular basis is which marketing channel had the highest ROI and conversion rate? The answer to this question will give you the intelligence to select the best channel(s) to re-invest in, giving you the best return on your marketing dollars.

Having access to key customer data, provides you with the intelligence to predict what your customers desire, to provide relevant and personalised content, to the right audience, at the right time. With actionable marketing analytics, you can identify, attract, interact with, and retain your most valuable customers, enabling marketing success.

To achieve this success with marketing analytics, you need to collect the right data, manage/analyse it, and transform your knowledge into actionable insights. Because unless you do something with the knowledge you have, you’re not getting any value or gaining benefit.

With the above trends in mind, Professional Advantage is conducting a seminar on the topic. Join us and learn all about the Anatomy of Marketing Analytics and how you can drive actionable analysis from your marketing data, discover fresh insights and achieve higher ROI. Click here for full event details and registration form.

Let’s imagine for instance turning up to the office on Monday morning to discover that the application server hosting the finance and warehouse applications has failed in a major way and the server won’t boot. The onsite IT support troubleshoots and discovers a major hardware component has failed, he immediately calls the hardware vendor. When the hardware vendor arrives around lunch time critical systems have been down for 4 hours and major operations like billing and dispatch have ground to a halt. After replacing a number of components the server is operational again but Windows still won’t boot, as it looks like the data has corrupted on disk. At this point the hardware engineer steps away having done his job, leaving the onsite IT engineer in a world of hurt with operational hardware but corrupted software and critical services still offline. It is at 3pm that the support person bites the bullet and reinstalls Windows and prepares data for restoration, most likely from tape, with also adds time and complexity to the process. Before he can bring the services back online he needs to arrange for reconfiguration and installation of the major applications by the support vendors. If he is lucky he can arrange this for after hours, but most likely it will be next morning before they can reinstall and configure the applications for him. By the time data is restored and services operational, the system will have been down for 36 hours or more.

A major headache in the whole process was requiring external application expertise to re-install and configure applications. These days backup software can snapshot the state of the entire server, meaning that the IT support person doesn’t need to rely on any application expertise to restore the server. In the example above, the onsite IT engineer could have restored a backup of the entire server in a matter of hours once hardware was available. For a small server it is likely it would be back up in under half an hour. Certainly having a virtualised environment simplifies and reduces recovery time, however this type of technology and rapid recovery is also available for physical server installs. 

Many companies still employing older data level backup technology are not aware of the complexity and time required to recover from these types of disasters. A company may have a good backup of their data but it doesn’t mean they can automatically recover an entire system in the event of a disaster let alone meet recovery time objectives. Modern backup software and recovery techniques have paved the way for greatly simplified disaster recovery and have reduced recovery time. We have seen this technology trickle down from the enterprise and be available to everyone, even the smallest SMB. Today the process of recovering an entire server is almost child’s play. When I started in IT you needed the involvement of a number of experts if you had any chance at a successful recovery.

To hear the latest improvements in IT disaster recovery and tips on setting up a business continuity plan for your organisation, register for our complimentary business survival guide seminar to be held in Sydney and Melbourne.

If you take a look at the ‘way back when’ engine web.archive.org, it’s pretty clear to see a significant change in the external web sites of most business over the last five years.

But what about our intranets? If we way-back-when-ed our intranets how much have they changed in five years? What about five years ahead? Will we be solving the same problems or will we laugh at the immaturity of our current mindset?

I believe the most important intranet elements for the next five years will be:

• social integration of intranets for staff
• role of search
• mobile devices
• location targeted information
• user centric design

 Five years ago the first iPhone had only just been released and the iPad was still another three years away. Facebook had only recently opened its doors to public users, and Twitter was in its infancy. The pace of technological change can be frightening, making it difficult to forecast even five years ahead.

Having said that, in terms of probability these elements will have an impact on our business in 2018. None of these are in the realm of science fiction, they are being done right now. And come 2018, it’s reasonable to expect that these ideas will be a ‘given’ for any reasonable sized business, much in the same vein as email, telephones or internet access are today.

Social integration of intranets for staff

All the big kids have spent the last few years building or buying their way into this space.   It doesn’t take too much industry knowledge to see key players creating (or buying) their own social platforms. Microsoft have been building social features into SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, they paid $1.2 billion for Yammer, and also have strategic partnerships with NewsGator; Salesforce built Chatter; VMware have Socialcast; Cisco have built/bought a collection of collaboration tools; Atlassian built Confluence; TIBCO created tibbr; SAP bought Success Factors. All the cool kids are doing it. Why? They’re doing it because it’s going to be big. Organisations will use social business platforms and tools to revolutionise the way information is created, shared, consumed and retained.

Connected organisations and user-generated content improve information sharing and retention in a way we haven’t seen before. Social business tools take the groundswell of social media adoption, and use it to share knowledge, generate engagement, and store retained business knowledge in a way that makes our existing tools look primitive. I see many uses for social business tools, they will become the backbone for the way we create, share, consume and retain business knowledge.

Role of search

Every minute, 72 hours of video content is added to YouTube. There are 340 million tweets per day. There are close to 29 million pages of content on Wikipedia. Inside the organisation, we’re also seeing unprecedented growth in content creation. With more and more content being created, we need to create better ways of aggregating and finding information.

 Search will play a critical role in connecting staff with the information they need to do their job. Searching across multiple systems, repositories and farms will become a key technique for managing the ‘findability’ of the exponential explosion in content we are creating.

 Ask yourself, would your organisation be more efficient if all resources available to staff were to become searchable and actually findable? 

Mobile devices

The mobile revolution is already upon us, but its growth and impact will still dictate the next five years.

Regardless of whether companies provide them, or staff bring their own device, employees will use a collection of devices to access work content. Smart phones, tablets, ultrabooks and a collection of devices that seem to be hybrids of each of these are commonplace in all areas of business. This is the case across all business verticals, not just corporate executives. Retail staff, manufacturing/ engineering, mobile sales representatives and restaurant staff are all using mobile devices for key business processes. There is a shift in user expectations, and staff are expecting that these tools will be available to them.

 At the moment, email and calendar applications are by far the most used mobile applications. Over the next five years we will see huge developments in applications and tools that allow staff to add value and carry out business activities while away from their desk, mobile access to the organisations intranet being one of them.

Location targeted information

We are yet to really take advantage of the potential of mobile devices in the area of location-based information. Location-based social media sites like Foursquare (and Facebook to a lesser extent) have paved the way for location targeting.

Devices will be context- and location-aware, allowing notifications and alerts to be pushed to staff when they are in their vicinity. Manufacturing plant operators will be alerted to upcoming plant maintenance schedules, retail operators will be alerted of low inventory/stock levels, engineering staff will be notified of safety alerts when arriving on site or when servicing potentially dangerous equipment.

This style of contextual information publishing will feed directly into our social information stream, giving us the information we need at the time we need to do something about it.

User-centric design

In the past, IT departments built systems based on functional and technical requirements, delivering functionality that meets the documented business rules. In many ways, this process is flawed. Over the past few years, we’ve started seeing a significant shift in the way we deliver projects, and an increasing adoption of user centric design techniques.

User-experience and user-centric design techniques address these requirements from a user point of view, rather than a systems view. Who are the people who will be using the system? What do we know about them? What are their goals, motivations, experiences, and expectations? What information do they need to perform that task? How can we design a solution that best meets their needs?

In the next five years, we will (slowly) see intranet and IT teams shifting away from point-to-point system solutions, and understand the role that user-centric design plays in developing holistic and usable tools to help people do their job.

The wrap

These predictions are here and now. There are companies pioneering these new areas of intranet innovation, and reaping the rewards. 

As a business professional, what does this mean for you?

• If this is the first time you’ve thought about some of these things, you need to find out more about them.
• If these things aren’t on your radar for the next 2-three years, they should be. Start making a mid-range plan for how they will impact your business.
• If you are already walking the path, congratulations and godspeed.

Want more information?

Register for the complimentary Future of intranets seminar being held in Sydney and Melbourne on 29th and 30th  May.

As the keynote speaker, I will cover in more detail, where intranets are heading, what the benefits are to your business and the key areas all intranets should be embracing now to revolutionise the way your business creates, shares, consumes and retains information.

The last seminar on this was incredibly popular and places are limited so register now.

fig 1 Maintaining inactive accounts

Choose to clear the balances of unit accounts so their balance brought forward is zero.

fig 2 Clear balances of unit accounts

Clearly track your year-end status with a progress bar.

fig 3 Progress bar

Use the journal entry enquiry window to view journals from historical years.

fig 4 Journal entry for historical data

 Store the approval user and date in the year to date transaction open and history tables when a batch is approved so you can run inquiries in various GP reports. 

fig 5 Storing approval user and date for inquiries

Choose to copy the analytical accounting transaction dimension information when copying sales order process, purchase order process or general ledger transaction.

This should give you an insight into some of the exciting new features of the general ledger. If you would like to know more about Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013, Professional Advantage is holding a free seminar, ‘Discover the Possibilities’, in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth where Errol Schoenfish, Director of Product Management for Microsoft Dynamics GP will be the key note speaker. To find out more click here.

 The system manager has added lots of new features to do what a system manager is supposed to do, increase control and boost productivity; speeding up the process of accessing the information that is important to you. With the new system manager you can:

• Access and utilise Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 over the internet using a web browser from the office, the road or at home.
• Integrate SSRS reports with various ledgers, meaning users can simply print the reports from particular windows and the reports will display information relevant to the records retrieved on form.
• Create back orders, picking tickets and packing slips templates in Microsoft Word.
• Host multiple clients in a hosted environment by selecting various application components where the web service and web client are the initial applications.
• Select where to print any dexterity report at the point of printing.
• Use Microsoft Office 64.
• Have multiple instances of Dynamics GP 2013 on the same SQL server.
• Run SSRS reports for multiple instances of Dynamics GP 2013from a single SSRS server. Multiple instances of web services from a single web server are also allowed.
• Protect documents you email with a password to prevent recipients from editing unless granted permission.
• Save sorted records as a custom view so they don’t need to sort for each lookup, this also applies to any Smartlist.
• Easily attach scanned documents to various Dynamics GP 2013 windows.

 This should give you an overview of what to expect from the new systems manager in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013. If you want to know more, Errol Schoenfish, Director of Product Management at Microsoft Dynamics GP is speaking at our free seminar, ‘Discover the Possibilities’, where he will be discussing where Microsoft’s roadmap for Dynamics GP 2013 is heading. The seminar is being held in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, details here.

In the past (very) few years, we have seen an explosion of smart devices, specifically smart phones and tablet-like devices such as iPads, the many android equivalents, and recently Microsoft’s Surface product.

Why have these devices received such rapid adoption by a wide range of users, from business people, young people and even the elderly? It is because they are easy to use, have fast responses, have excellent graphics quality and fill a need where a single device can supply music, video, communication, books (both audio and text), games, GPS mapping, and the list goes on almost endlessly.

My son-in-law is a primary school teacher. His school has recently required all year 5 and 6 students to have an iPad or equivalent device as part of their normal learning equipment. So it looks like smart devices are here to stay.

Every client I have dealings with is now either using a mobile solution as part of their CRM system or is asking what is required to get into this mobile area. More and more employees are asking their IT department to allow them to connect their personal mobile device to corporate systems.

So the question is, is a mobile solution easy or difficult? The answer can depend on whether you are looking from the end-user or IT perspective. We recently we rolled out the use of the CWR Mobile solution for our internal Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to our sales staff. This rollout took a matter of minutes for the CRM administrator once the background configuration was done (which took a few hours). For the user, it was simply downloading the app to their phone from the relevant mobile app store then connecting to our CRM system and they were away.

User feedback is already positive from the sales staff. They can now review their appointments, opportunity data, client data, etc., when on the road without the need to log into a computer. As the CWR solution allows data to be stored off-line, they don’t even need to have mobile coverage to do all these tasks. Synchronisation back to the CRM server happens automatically when mobile coverage is re-established.

What does it take for IT to get to this point? The most obvious need is for the CRM to be accessible outside the corporate IT domain. For Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this is done by deploying Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS) which is the Microsoft-recommended approach to allowing secure access to your corporate CRM data. Then, depending on the solution chosen, it could be a few hours work to configure the solution to meet your particular business needs.

For Microsoft Dynamics CRM there are essentially two types of mobile solution: the free Microsoft mobile solution that is included out of the box, or a third party solution, of which there are quite a few. Professional Advantage chose to be a reseller and user of the CWR Mobile solution because it has excellent local support, it allows off-line capability, and configuration of the mobile solution uses very similar tools to that of native CRM configuration. It also allows JavaScript on mobile forms, so the business rules enforced in the corporate solution can be replicated in the mobile solution.

The Microsoft free solution is pretty basic but it will be suitable for some clients who only need to view data or have limited data entry needs for their mobile solution.

There are lots of resources on the internet already that explain the detail of how a mobile solution is configured and the benefits of each type of solution. My point is that if you (as an IT or business area manager) are not already considering a mobile solution you will soon be forced to by your staff!

So is a mobile solution easy for IT? Yes it is, if you choose the solution most suitable for your staff and it is easy to configure, like the CWR solution is.

Providing a mobile solution will almost certainly be widely adopted by staff which means you will be getting the most out of the investment made in your CRM system, and the business will benefit from staff using the system to its full capability rather than avoiding it as being “admin work when I should be out selling”.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and Microsoft Dynamics CRM here.

The KPI was the percentage first match of an invoice to the order. How powerful. It summarised all the steps that needed to be achieved throughout the organisation. They started out with a target of 88%. I’m not sure of the logic for 88% but a good target nevertheless. Over time they reached and started to consistently beat that target using iPOS .

This KPI indicates the ongoing application of good procurement practice. To have this set at 85 – 90% means the system is operating very smoothly. The organisation’s mindset in order to achieve this goal is one of continuous improvement.

When the organisation is achieving 90% first match, this translates into the following system goals being achieved:

1. The purchase orders are not created after the fact.
2. Spend has not circumvented the organisations’ approval regime.
3. Physical recognition of the goods has been acknowledged. Sometimes organisations find this ‘inconvenient’. I do not get this inconvenience when you are spending the company’s money.
4. The price and quantities as ordered are received and invoiced, subject to agreed tolerances.
5. The organisation probably has an effective policy of electronic trading with suppliers.
6. The organisation has effective procedures in place to limit the spread and number of suppliers and the growth of internal catalogues.
7. The processing of the purchase transaction of goods and services is being done at a low cost. There is no ineffective administration resource re-doing work.
8. Spend control is in place as requisitions are allocated to cost centres, budget checked and prior approval before the actual expenditure.

Why do I remember this so clearly? I remember the CEO having a heated discussion with his opposite number at a major brewer as the supplier’s billing system was truncating the PO number and thus not achieving first match. The interesting point the CEO made was that this supplier cost him say £10 to process an invoice as opposed to other suppliers whose invoices would cost a fraction of a penny as they passed all electronic business rules automatically. Hundreds if not thousands of invoices were involved and it was costing the company dearly to do business ineffectively. This issue was so important that the call was CEO to CEO.

Often when we discuss motivations for electronic procurement the talk centres on empowering the organisation to negotiate for better prices. The reality in my experience is different, as most companies have already negotiated prices that are not fattened. However we have seen suppliers who will offer discounts as an incentive for an organisation to do business electronically.

Punch out and electronic invoices are the foundation stones for low procurement administration costs and the key measure of your ongoing success is percentage first match. The question that needs to be asked is: “What do I have to do to only pay a fraction of a cent to process horrid paperwork.”

If as Procurement Manager you had the opportunity to headline one daily KPI to the CEO what would that KPI be?

You can read more about Professional Advantage and iPOS here.

Kimberly Land Council used iPOS to improve a key KPI by 50%. Read the case study.

This statement became the topic of discussion at a recent company meeting.

At one level, it could be suggested Professional Advantage sells a variety of software applications. There is nothing unique in that. From another perspective it could be suggested the expertise and experience of our people forms the basis of what we sell. Whilst there may be some uniqueness to our skill sets, it does not fully encapsulate our offering. The reason is both products and expertise are simply inputs, they are ingredients.

For us, it was better to turn the question around, “What do clients buy from us?” Yes, clients buy products and yes, clients buy expertise. But, there must be a reason behind these purchases. The purpose of acquiring products and expertise is to make something of these ingredients.

Putting products and expertise together in such a way that ‘improves a business’ is the essence of what Professional Advantage sells and what clients buy.

There is a danger that business improvement can be viewed as a motherhood statement. But I disagree. A business improvement project has a broader mandate. These projects are generally characterised by three key points:

1. They have an executive sponsor
2. They are derived from a broader vision
3. They act as a change agent

However just having these characteristics is no guarantee that the business will improve. They are essential pre-requisites but a project will also need discipline and nurturing if it is to make a lasting difference.

Discipline is required in business improvement projects to hold the course to the overall objective. Improving a business is not always easy, it requires us to change the way we work. To forge new ways of working requires a business to remain focused on the end goal. Using an implementation partner can help to uphold this discipline.

Also, nurturing is the flip side of discipline. It is the yin to the yang. To massage change through an organisation that will improve the business requires care. Nurturing helps ideas to grow and take hold. It requires understanding, forethought and attention. These subtleties make project life more interesting and dynamic.

There is an art to getting it right. It is not easy but the results are rewarding. This is why we sell business improvement and not simply products or skills.

Blog written by Chris Pennington, Consultant to PA. The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the writer. Content published here does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Professional Advantage Pty Ltd.

You can read more about Professional Advantage here and the work we have done with clients to achieve improvements to their businesses here.

Lots of services based companies have machine elements in their operations. Financial transaction processing is a classic example of machine behaviour, a cash withdrawal from a bank ATM is absolutely machine work, strict rules, no exceptions, speed is king. Potential for improvement in that area tends to be measured in eliminating seconds (if not milliseconds) out of the end-to-end transaction cycle. The corporate procure-to-pay cycle is another common example. With delegated approvals and functions like catalogue punch-out and electronic ordering/receipting & invoicing there are not many surprises or exceptions that cannot be codified and handled accordingly.

Most modern services businesses have automated their ‘machine’ activities to a greater or lesser extent with the usual business applications like ERP and CRM, etc. Of course in the manufacturing, assembly and other ‘manual’ industries, specialised automated production lines and robotics are very prevalent.

The great thing about the machine is that virtually everything can be predicted and allowed for. The rules by which the machine can operate are clearly defined and can be mapped out to ensure the best results. But for a large proportion of activities in your business you quite probably rely on people rather than systems. For example, onboarding a new private wealth client in financial services, or the sales process in a complex services business. This is the ‘knowledge economy’. The difference with the knowledge economy is that you are relying on the intuition and experience, the whim and wherewithal, the care and caution of individual people. Indeed highly paid people who stand somewhat apart from the machine.

The knowledge economy is goal driven and there are really only 3 meaningful metrics: cash (costs or margin), customer service and competitive advantage. And of course they all come with a wrapper of compliance. Getting your KPIs to move in the right direction in a knowledge world is not always easy and probably, at the moment, your results are unpredictable.

The knowledge economy is the new frontier for competitive advantage. How do you enable your people to do more of what we humans do best, think and make wise contextual decisions, without rigidly enforcing rules and compliance mechanisms that either make the people irrelevant or ineffectual? And at the same time capture the knowledge you are paying for and get predictability and visibility into the equation?

PA can help you get the most out of your knowledge economy.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and XMPro here.