All executives understand the significance, for their company and for their career, of creating and implementing strategy. Because of the significance of strategy, and because strategy forces executives to confront the future, many find it scary. Savvy executives understand that not all business challenges can be resolved from inside their organization. Savvy executives rely on
Understanding your financial metrics at a granular level is important in that it allows for a true understanding of what is happening, and what is not. It enables you to drill down and appreciate, for example, similarities, differences, and outliers. Being informed at a granular level enables better decision-making when it comes to determining how
Although our economy has rebounded since the 2008 downturn we have come to realize that the days of abundant resources are gone. Our current and future economic reality consists of scarce resources and a shrinking opportunity base. Managers face the challenge of expanding their business and reducing their spending, while still making meaningful progress now
With today’s merger and acquisition (M&A) activity at the highest level since 2007, up 38% over the same period last year, there’s been a great deal of shifting lately. In the high-tech industry, analysts are following a particular trend among original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) – mergers and acquisitions of niche aftermarket service industry participants. Electronic
Being in the strategic advisory space, I get a lot of exposure to various business strategies, strategic plans, and sales plans, both internally to organizations and from outsiders looking to raise money or gain influence. When it comes to strategic planning, too often there is “creative accounting.” That is, the artful creation of financials that match and make numerical
Before you finalize your budget, take inventory. What do you really need? A friend recently shared a story with me. Her company had been subject to budget cuts over the past several years. Each year the question wasn’t if there would be cuts, but rather how much would be shaved off an already tight budget.
Remember the days when a rear-view mirror was all we needed to make business decisions? Now, predictive analytics appears poised to turn hindsight into a relic of the past. Two Gartner analysts echo that sentiment, stating, “Few technology areas will have greater potential to improve the financial performance and position of a commercial global enterprise
The sharing of tangible and intangible assets will increasingly become a fundamental feature of successful businesses. Few developments of late are as intriguing as the rise and disruptive impact of the collaborative economy. In a very short time, services that we may have thought of as permanent fixtures of our business and personal lives have
Analytics is good for business — as long as you can make sense of it. Does your business suffer from a case of data overload? Or do you steer clear of new investments in supply chain analytics because you are afraid they could yield more data than your business can handle? You are in good
Mergers and acquisitions are increasingly popular strategies toward growth; however, 40% to 80% of mergers fail to meet objectives. M&A is complicated, and goes beyond simply “the process of buying a company.” At its heart it is a strategic selection of competencies that fill a void in a company’s offering, geography, technology, or industry area of focus.
Concurrent with the extraordinary rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), predictive analytics are gaining in popularity. With an increasing number of companies learning to master the precursors to developing predictive models — namely, connecting, monitoring, and analyzing — we can safely assume the art of gleaning business intelligence from foresight will continue to grow rapidly.
A distribution center struggling with a high number of forklift truck impacts found a way to leverage big data to address a nagging, costly warehouse issue. The company had installed a telematics solution on its forklift trucks, but could not determine the cause of the impacts. The time and location of impacts were known, as
