What's the route to maximum enterprise wide performance? Ultimately, it's the path of openness. That answer may sound like something you'd expect to hear from a mystical guru, but it's rigorously pragmatic. In an open enterprise, the various branches of the organization share information seamlessly with one another. Instead of...
Businesses are sick and tired of the hard insurance market, particularly for property and casualty coverage, and they are looking for a way out. For many proactive organizations, the exit signs point toward forming a captive insurance company as part of their long-term risk management strategy. In its most common...
Retirement is changing. Many employees no longer aim to quit work entirely when they reach a certain age. Instead, they simply want to dial things down by working fewer hours, gaining more flexibility in their schedules, and stepping off the high-stress promotion track. Unfortunately for many companies, older workers often...
A person does not have to advertise and promote so hard if his or her product, service, or operation is a well oiled machine. The person should utilize marketing to create and implement a cohesive and measurable plan, and to help find what makes the organization striking. The person should...
Predicting" the company's financial future has always been core to Business Performance Management BPM systems, and the analysis of corporate data has become an increasingly important feature of management reporting systems over the past few years. The basic functionality underlying today's "Predictive analytics" uses data from the past to generate...
Dashboards that monitor organizational performance can spark a great awakening within the businesses that use them. Instead of waiting a month or two to see how actuals compare with plans, dashboard users are alerted to a performance shortfall almost as soon as it occurs, so they have the chance to...
Most companies don't stand out in the marketplace "Sea of sameness." And because they don't stand out, they are not connecting with potential customers. These weak brands strain resources and give the feeling of working harder for less. The main reason most companies don't stand out is because they don't...
The customer may be king, but somewhere between rhetoric and reality, most organizations have discovered that courting and keeping customers is a royal pain. Over the last decade, global competition, downward pressure on profit margins, and easy access to product information and pricing for competitors and consumers have made it...
By evaluating Vision Awards entrants over the past 10 years, the author has had the pleasure of seeing BPM systems and processes demonstrably improve the management of a wide variety of organizations. The winners have established leading approaches to performance management that many other businesses have been inspired to follow....
Continuous auditing's surprisingly long gestational period is nearing a conclusion. For software vendors, academics, consultants and a handful of practitioners at early-adopter companies, the primary question is: Why has it taken so long for corporations to embrace it? The delay can't be justified by claims of high cost. A $200,000...
Not long ago, most CFOs regarded records management as a minor administrative function, and not one that finance should particularly be concerned about. Finance executives were usually content to let company records gather dust. These days, though, CFOs are brushing the cobwebs off their organization's records systems and taking a...
Companies have begun combining Dad's "Beat it" attitude with CRM software to make getting rid of customers a practice to be proud of. What does it take to be a best-in-class customer cutter? Technology is important, of course, but convincing customers to never come back is still one of those...
The promise of business performance management processes and technology is strategic, but many implementers achieve only tactical, incremental improvements. This paper presents why - and what can be done about it. This vision of strategic BPM portrays managers in complex organizations behaving in an entrepreneurial fashion while, paradoxically, enhancing the...
An unmistakable gap in Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting BPF competency continues between world-class companies and less stellar organizations. According to research conducted by Houston-based American Productivity and Quality Center APQC, a nonprofit process-improvement and benchmarking organization, top-flight businesses use leading practices such as the rolling forecast, a single instance of...
Marketing spending is critical. It directly affects both corporate revenues and earnings. That's why companies need to treat the marketing budget as a precious and scarce resource. Figuring out how to generate the highest possible long-term returns on how and where marketing spends money should be a priority for Business...
It is always important for people in finance to have a good understanding of the overall business. This paper presents the findings of an interview with Cathy Ross, senior vice president and CFO of Memphis, Tenn.-based FedEx Express, who excels by focusing on facts, analyzing opportunities, and surrounding herself with...
Economists are forecasting lower U.S. and flat world economic growth for 2006 and substantially slower profit growth for U.S. companies. Savvy CFOs are positioning their company to grow through the coming slowdown. The paper reveals that after a period of strong revenue growth and better alignment between costs and pricing,...
Many companies see globalization as both an opportunity and a threat, and wisely so. While new markets provide the opportunity to grow the top line, they are also producing bold new competitors. In this environment, the lack of a global operations strategy that provides effective sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and service...
Economic conditions have not been kind to organizations that sponsor defined-benefit pension plans over the past years. The high-flying stock market in the 1990s provided an extended funding holiday for many plan sponsors as returns left pension plans with more than enough money to fund liabilities and then some. The...
The range of organizations that leverage the defaulted debt market is growing. Chief Financial Officers who want to boost their company's liquidity may be sitting on a potential gold mine in the form of defaulted receivables. Prices for defaulted consumer debt have increased sharply in past years, driven by the...
