Ask QueBIT About Analytics

Episode 62: Taking Technology Fandom to the Next Level Guest: Christoph Hein Most of us are ambivalent about the technology we use at work. Ideally, we don’t even want to think about it. We know that technology enables business operations to proceed at a speed and scale that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago. In fact, anytime our work-technology attracts attention to itself, it’s usually not for a good reason. But sometimes a piece of technology gets a foothold somewhere and becomes the basis for a community of passionate fans whose imaginations are sparked by all the creative possibilities it enables. Christoph Hein, our guest this week, epitomizes this kind of fandom as an active member of the global community of TM1 adherents. TM1, which is now IBM Planning Analytics, is a multi-dimensional database and modeling platform used for many financial and operational planning and reporting applications in companies of all sizes around the world. In this conversation, Christoph shares how he went from studying History in University to being the “TM1 Fan Boy” and shares several interesting non-traditional examples of how TM1 is used where he works, at Deutsche Bahn. We also get to hear about the planninganalyticsguide.com website, which Christoph’s passion project in collaboration with BARC, and analyst firm.

Episode 61: ESG and Sustainability Reporting Primer Guest: Bill Primerano ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and Sustainability Reporting requirements for businesses are well on their way to becoming unavoidable. For some companies it’s another example of costly government overreach that adds to the workloads of an already stretched workforce, while for others it’s an opportunity to drive efficiency, innovation, and long-term business success. The goal of this episode of the AskQueBIT podcast is to break down the task of ESG and Sustainability Reporting using an Analytics lens, separating requirements definition from data wrangling and reporting. We believe this is useful because requirements definition for ESG and sustainability reporting is difficult and daunting. What is valuable to measure and report on varies greatly between industries, and expectations are still in flux, leaving many companies to figure things out on their own. Meanwhile data wrangling and reporting, while also difficult and daunting, are familiar activities for any company that has ever done an analytics project, for example implementing a Financial Planning software platform, or a business intelligence solution for Vendor Analysis. Knowing that you may already have experience and tools for this half of the challenge ought to be comforting. Our guest this week is Bill Primerano who is the World Wide Technical Sales Leader for IBM Business Analytics. Bill recently got back from Europe where sustainability and ESG reporting are top priorities for many of IBM’s major customers. In our conversation Bill tells us about the frameworks that companies are using to get a handle on ESG and Sustainability Reporting requirements, and how some of them are truly embracing the opportunity to re-tool their entire strategies to support a sustainable – and long-term profitable - future.

Episode 59: Analytics Shorts: 3 Stories Guests: Tyler King, Deepak Kumar, A.G. Tan This week we are showcasing three of QueBIT’s expert consultants: Tyler King, Deepak Kumar and A.G. Tan. They have so many great stores to tell, but very little spare time, so we came up with this idea of the three-minute-story. Tell us about a favorite project in about three minutes by recording it on your own phone, whenever you have a moment! It’s a fun format, and you get to hear about a global convenience store company, a retailer and a bank … all in under 15 minutes! Each of these companies had a different planning and analysis business problem that they solved using analytics technology and a little help from QueBIT. We hope these examples help you imagine the value analytics technology can bring. It goes far beyond merely saving time, reducing manual effort and better governance, important as these all are. What we strive for is to help companies improve the quality of their decision making, by presenting all the relevant information to each individual at the time they need it, and in a form they can readily consume.

Episode 59: Breaking Down Silos between Finance and Operations  Guest: Amyn Dhamani Specialized functions – or “Silos” – evolve in companies for a very good reason. It’s simply more efficient to clearly partition all the work that needs to be done, so that everyone knows what is expected of them without having to spend a ton of time coordinating and communicating. Imagine a soccer team where no-one has a clear responsibility, and everyone is BOTH a striker and a defender: this team is unlikely to prevail against one of equivalent skill whose players adopt more traditional roles. All good things have limitations though, including specialization. Imagine a soccer team in which some players refuse to pass the ball to their teammates, perhaps because they do not trust their skills, or their commitment. This is clearly not a winning strategy either and a good coach invests heavily in trust-building and camaraderie to improve teamwork. The same thing applies in companies. As companies grow it naturally becomes more and more difficult to know everyone well enough to trust them, and cross-functional teamwork suffers as a result. It takes investment and effort to mitigate this, but the rewards include a happier, more motivated workforce, better decision-making, and a healthier bottom-line. Our guest this week is Amyn Dhamani who has spent 20 years working as a transformative Finance Leader at several major companies including Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages where he is currently the Director of Finance for Supply Chain FP&A. Amyn has first-hand experience of the benefits of partnering across functions and shares several real-life examples of how to build such partnerships and realize tangible business value as a result.

Episode 58: Whatever happened to IBM Watson? Guest: Mike McGeein, IBM In early 2011 a computer called Watson, developed by IBM, stunned the world by beating two of the all-time best human players of Jeopardy, a TV quiz show. To pull this off, Watson had to navigate vast amounts of unstructured knowledge, while also dealing with uncertainty, adding orders-of-magnitude complexity to the combinatoric problems solved by chess-playing computers of past generations. Watson ushered in the dawn of the latest age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), well ahead of Apple Siri (Oct 2011) and Amazon Alexa (Nov 2014), and (unlike the intelligent assistants) without access to all the knowledge of the internet. For several years, Watson was the centerpiece of many IBM marketing campaigns, but recently we have heard less and less about it. Or so it seems … This week we talk to Mike McGeein of IBM who explains how IBM took that original research and infused it all across its software products, including Mike’s own charge, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson.

Episode 57: How to be a Transformative CFO Guest: Brian Frohn Large influential consultancies like McKinsey, Gartner and others have been talking for several years now about how the responsibilities of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) are expanding to include their companies’ digital activities. This makes sense, since the Office of Finance is the most central of all functions in any business, and embracing digital technology is the only way for Finance to stay connected in an age when data volumes and velocities are exploding. But just because it makes sense doesn’t mean that it is easy to do. Those who work in Finance have demanding day-jobs with hard deadlines, and little room for error. Surveys of finance professionals regularly show that more time is spent on low-value tasks like data manipulation and validation, leaving very little time for high-value analysis and interpretation. While most people understand that the use of technology is necessary to correct this imbalance, finding a way to break the cycle is extremely difficult. This week we talked to Brian Frohn, who recently started a new career as an Executive Coach after many years working as a CFO and a CEO. In this conversation, we dug into Brian’s own experiences of how to drive change in an achievable manner, and how he – as a non-technologist who started their career in Public Accounting – was able to introduce technology that transformed how his Finance team did their jobs for the better. Find out more about Brian at https://stoicexecutive.com.

Episode 56: Predictive Planning for Finance Guest: Justin Croft How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help the Office of Finance? Since most of the AI use-cases in the media revolve around intelligent assistants (like Siri and Alexa), or self-driving cars, it can be hard for those of us who support businesses in quantitative functions – such as Finance – to see where AI is relevant to our jobs. But Predictive Analytics is a sub-topic within the broader field of AI! Predictive Analytics – which encompasses familiar mathematics like linear regressions – is all about using the patterns of the past to project the future. One benefit comes from reducing manual effort while minimizing subjectivity and bias in getting to a starting point for your plan or forecast. This takes care of the easily predictable parts of the plan, while freeing up more time for deeper scrutiny of the strategically important ones, for example new product introductions, or new market expansions. Our guest this week is Justin Croft who leads QueBIT Solution Architecture and Data Science group, but whose career started in Finance. Justin will share concrete, relatable examples of now Predictive Analytics has been successfully deployed in financial planning and forecasting use-cases, and how QueBIT’s prescriptive and repeatable methodology can deliver meaningful results in as little as 6 – 8 weeks!

Episode 55: A New Era for Procurement and Sourcing Guest: Bryan Baum/Anaplan Procurement and Sourcing are critical functions, especially at companies whose prosperity depends on maintaining well-oiled supply chains. A job that requires diligence and attention to detail under normal circumstances, suddenly calls for quick decisions and agility, when times become volatile. This week we have a fascinating conversation with Bryan Baum, an experienced Procurement and Sourcing manager, who now leads the Procurement, Sourcing and Supply Chain Solutions group at Anaplan, a vendor of connected planning software platforms. Among other things we learn how technology can help to close the gap between diligent attention to detail, and the need for speed and agility, by guaranteeing ready availability of trustworthy data in the timeframe needed to support decision-making.

Guest: Deepak Kumar As a company grows and needs to develop specialized functions such as “Sales”, “Operations” and “Finance”, keeping everyone coordinated and on the same page takes more and more concerted effort. Over time, this natural separation leads to separate systems, business processes and data sets, since different functions have varying technology-support needs. While an individual function’s technology investment can lead to day-jobs becoming easier in that function, there is a cost in terms of added complexity in the data and technology landscape, which makes it harder to get a holistic view of the business. In this episode we talk to Deepak Kumar, QueBIT’s Supply Chain specialist, about how tracking shared Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across the finance and operational supply chain functions can help companies transcend internal barriers in a practical way to make integrated business planning a reality. As always, we try to keep the discussion jargon-free, so that even someone unfamiliar with the business jargon around supply chains and KPIs will – hopefully – enjoy getting a deeper understanding of the issues.

Guest: Bruna Garcia In 2021 “Supply Chain” went from being an esoteric piece of business jargon, to being a household phrase. We will leave it to the popular press to fan the flames of public anxiety while lambasting industries plagued with Supply Chain problems. Instead, we will dig into how companies plan both demand and supply in order to manage their supply chains, and what challenges they need to overcome to produce and transport their goods in an efficient, timely and profitable manner. Our guest this week is Bruna Garcia, who is a Solution Architect and Master Consultant at QueBIT, specializing in the design and implementation of systems that support all aspects of supply chain planning including demand planning, supply planning and inventory optimization. In this conversation we start at the very beginning by introducing the basic concepts, and then we go on to talk about where Bruna has seen room for companies to improve their abilities to plan both demand and supply with greater agility and accuracy, and how this can be a first step to more supply chain resilience in the face of disruptions, like those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Episode 52: Allocations for the Insurance Industry Guest: Chris Willson Isn’t profitability the same as revenue? Why does the difference matter? If these questions sound boring, how about this one: How would you feel if you went out to an expensive dinner with your siblings and agreed ahead-of-time to split the check equally, but then one sibling orders (and consumes) twice as much as anyone else? Shouldn’t they pay their “fair share”? This comes up in business when there are multiple entities competing for resources. For example, product lines competing for marketing investment, or sales teams competing for incentives to pass on to their biggest customers. It’s easy to report on the top-line revenue associated with a product or a customer, but getting to its true value to the business means taking into account all the associated

Episode 51: Accelerating down the Home Stretch of xP&A Guest: Andy Weiss Some of the most important beneficiaries of a good Planning & Analysis process are on the front lines of the business. These are the people in sales, operations and line management whose day jobs are emphatically not about planning and analysis, but about building relationships, serving customers and doing the business of the business. These people also need data to do the best jobs they can, but if it is not convenient and easy to get it, they will naturally yield to more pressing priorities. Getting relevant, personalized data in a timely fashion to the front-lines represents the Home Stretch of any planning, analysis or reporting initiative. Sometimes we puzzle over why people do not take advantage of the wealth of data that is available to them, and we wonder why they don’t “bother” to learn how to get it. What we forget is that learning how to use a system that is – at best – adjacent to what you are being paid to do, will always be at the bottom of your priority list (not to mention your boss’s priority list). This week’s guest QueBIT Director of Product Management, Andy Weiss, argues that we are looking at this backwards. According to Andy the Home Stretch is a problem that can be solved if you put your mind to it. Instead of trying to change behaviors (which is hard), you can get relevant and useful data to the people who need it by delivering it right to them, wherever they work each day, in a format that is easy and convenient for them!

Episode 50: End-to-end Integrated Planning Processes at Chemtura Guest: Jessica Quiles Everyone is talking about Extended Planning and Analysis – or xP&A – these days.  On paper, it is easy to appreciate the benefits of integrating planning across finance and operational functions, which include making it easier to get everyone working together towards consistent strategic goals, wasting less energy on reconciling stand-alone plans and forecasts, and increasing forecast accuracy by removing biases. In reality xP&A is difficult. The challenges range from the political, to the practical. The three critical requirements are (1) developing a vision for what integrated planning looks like (while still supporting the special needs of each function in terms of detail, data and cadences), (2) a willingness to transform business processes to enable the vision, and (3) adoption of suitable technology to support it all. This week’s guest, Jessica Quiles, will talk about her early-career experiences at Chemtura which fifteen years ago (!) had already successfully integrated Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) with Financial Planning (FP&A), using the IBM Planning Analytics technology (then known as TM1). She has since taken those lessons on The Art of the Possible, to develop her career as a finance leader and to help other companies reap the benefits of moving towards xP&A.

Episode 49: The Importance of Data Strategy for xP&A Guest: Mike Burke At which point does the “data” part of your planning project start to take center-stage? When you go beyond grabbing general ledger trial balances from a single data source, to wanting to truly mine more of your enterprise data for deeper insights, more accurate forecasting, and ultimately better business outcomes. Everyone knows they have lots of data, but getting to it let alone putting it to work for you can be hard. Half the battle is recognizing the problem, and acknowledging that you can’t wrangle your data into submission without having a data strategy. This week we talk to QueBIT Expert and Implementation Manager Mike Burke about how he sees this question being tackled at the clients he works with, and what advice he can share on how to get on the right path.

Episode 48: Hybrid Cloud for Planning, Reporting and Analysis Guest: Mike Cowie It’s the summer of 2021 and IBM has been airing a series of TV commercials on something called “hybrid cloud”. One of them features racing driver Jamie Chadwick asking “why should your business go hybrid?”, and concluding “... so you can focus on, you know, winning!”. As specialists in extended, integrated planning and analysis, QueBIT’s mission is to help our clients win by having the data, models and tools they need to plan with agility, and make better decisions faster. While the vision sounds simple, the reality gets complicated especially as businesses nowadays have so much more data from a variety of systems. While the starting point is often to integrate your planning and reporting system with your ERP, it’s not the destination. Along the way, you may want to pull in data from many other systems, likely from a variety of vendors and applications, especially if you want to get to AI and machine learning-enabled use cases like predictive demand forecasting or predictive assortment planning. In this podcast episode we talk about IBM Cloud Pak for Data which is a hybrid cloud toolset that is tailor-made for enabling businesses to easily get value from their data, wherever it resides. As always we focus on understanding the proposition from a practical business point of view.

Episode 47: Why xP&A is not just marketing hype No guest Extended Planning and Analysis – or xP&A – is having a moment right now. It is the latest piece of jargon being hyped up by analysts like Gartner (who coined it) and planning software vendors like Anaplan, IBM and Workday Adaptive. Even QueBIT is talking about it! But is it JUST hype? In this week’s podcast episode, we explain why we believe it is more than mere hype, and represents a very real shift in how companies are rethinking their planning and reporting processes in a fast-moving, digital world awash in change and disruption. The old solution of working late or throwing more bodies at the problem is no longer realistic: it simply cannot scale at the pace the situation requires. We also talk about digital transformation in general, what is pushing companies to make those investments now, and how it is imperative that digital transformation of internal planning, analysis and reporting processes keeps pace with all the other changes. This is what embracing xP&A is all about. This podcast is sponsored by QueBIT.

Episode 46: Taking the First Step Guest: John Sterner It’s interesting how human beings are used to planning journeys through life – like vacations, going to college, and retirement – but when it comes to buying technology, there can be a tendency to want everything at once. Perhaps it is because there is “software program” involved? Perhaps software vendors have been too successful in invoking “magic” to overcome natural and healthy skepticism in order to satisfy their quarterly sales quotas? Or perhaps we buyers succumb to feeling intimidated by technology we don’t understand, and hesitate to ask all the reasonable questions, even when given the opportunity? Either way, often the “safe” option seems to be to do nothing, but this can come at tremendous opportunity cost especially when faced with change and disruption. In this week’s episode we talk to John Sterner about his 25 years helping companies implement technology, and why they often stop short of true digital transformation. This show is sponsored by QueBIT.

Episode 45: Software Evaluation Principles Guest: Christine Schoenen There is so much technology being thrown at us each day that deciding which software tools to invest in is overwhelming. It’s one thing to take a chance on a free app on your phone, but a completely different thing to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more!) on something like a software platform for analytics. This is where companies turn to trusted experts like QueBIT for guidance. But how do the experts know what to recommend? Don’t they face a similar problem? In this episode we talk to QueBIT Master Consultant Christine Schoenen about QueBIT’s formal process for evaluating software vendor partnerships. In 2020 Christine led a QueBIT Guild whose mission was to improve our software evaluation processes to increase agility, scalability and quality. The fruits of these efforts are now being put to good use! We also spend a little time talking about how Guild activities helped QueBIT employees to stay engaged and connected while working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Episode 44: The Sad Truth about Data No guest. “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” is a famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison. The QueBIT version of this is “Successful analytics is one percent modeling and 99 percent data preparation”! When you are shopping for technology, just as when you are shopping for anything, it helps to be informed. The goal of this week’s podcast is to share a foundational truth about every analytics project, whether it relates to financial or operational planning, or an enterprise reporting initiative.

Episode 43: 2020, The Year of Analytics No guest. 2020 was a difficult year on many fronts. It was also a year when companies needed to get more out of analytics technologies, to mitigate some of the challenges. Analytics evolved from being a “nice-to-have” to being an absolute necessity. Analytics helps you monitor what’s going on in your business and make data-driven predictions about the future. 2020 was also the year when QueBIT’s focus on extended planning and analysis (xP&A) as an analytics application area began to gain traction. xP&A plays to our strengths as experts in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), sales and operations planning (S&OP) and the cross-functional integration of the two, while allowing us to leverage all our technical prowess in financial modeling, data engineering and data science. In this short episode we summarize our year in Analytics, and wish all our clients, followers and friends a Happy New Year.