Dynamic words we are obsessed with: optimization, reduction, alignment, integration, operational execution, performance, flexibility, planning, forecasting, budgeting…
Wait, the last three words don’t really fit in the paradigm of the others. If we played a word association game, how can we link three dynamic critical applications - on which every finance department worldwide is focused, with the prior words which denote cohesion and a level of perfection in process that is only dreamed about? Until now, there was no way to link all these seemingly disparate concepts together. An army of consultants and programmers were your only hope of creating a single tightly coupled view of all your finance assets (even if you only purchased products from a single vendor). As of April 7, 2009 we are changing the game in Finance. Welcome to the true source of innovation in Finance. Today Star Analytics is launching the Star Finance Command Center. A breath of fresh air to the gloomy economic climate that has left us: devoid of manpower, riddled with gaps in availability from IT-delivered services, saddled with applications that have become lethargic and over-burdened with code fixes, data that seems inconsistent and stale, having to do business with vendors that merge and divest so fast it makes your head spin, and with the incongruous explicit need to be flexible, nimble and time-sensitive to drive profitability. What a conundrum.
The Star Finance Command Center delivers a technology platform imbued with a priori finance knowledge to provide a visual roadmap to your data and processes that drive the applications and reporting needs of the Office of the CFO. Any application from any vendor can easily be added as an ecosystem to share and process events and data to any other application. Applications such as global cash management, foreign exchange rates, strategic performance management, expense management, revenue costing, GAAP and IFRS reporting, and incentive compensation management can easily share data and integrate with the planning, budgeting and forecasting and consolidation applications which are the mainstay of finance.
Transforming code-based scripts and integrations into widgets and automations eliminates the need for technologically-savvy finance team members and reduces reliance on others from outside the department. We have customers with defunct and legacy applications, the latest releases, and one-off homegrown solutions simultaneously integrating and sharing data with Oracle, SAP, SAS, IBM Cognos, live data feeds and others. Most any data source one can imagine can be identified and named to help deliver laser-focused precision on defining a financial environment that drives your profitability.
The beauty of the system is that it can be deployed immediately in your current environment with little or no tailoring. Immediately you will see improvement in your business process and reduction in your operation’s costs. While implementing, you will be able to redeploy expensive manpower to other critical tasks. Your efforts with Master Data Management and Governance, Risk and Compliance initiatives will be supported out of the box and none of your previous work will be discarded or made obsolete until you choose. You can increase your level of sophistication with the Star Finance Command Center over time and take advantage of the finance-rich capabilities and simplify your existing code and integrations as you mature in achieving your goal to become a sleek, responsive, innovative and profitable organization.
This day marks the starting point of a new era of finance data integration and management. Welcome to Star Analytics and the Star Finance Command Center. http://www.staranalytics.com/
Showing posts with label sap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sap. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
A letter to the CIO we'd like to see...
Dear CIO,
I bet you never thought this day would come…me writing with good news that my team in Finance will be submitting fewer IT requests. Go figure (pun intended).
Turns out there’s a new way for my staff to manage more of the data, processes and workflows that your team has been handling for us from the finance and BI systems. No more resources needed to manually code and manage this. We can automate most of it while working within the security and data integrity parameters that IT has in place.
Let’s discuss two action items:
- Cancel next week’s sales meeting with our ERP vendor. The allure of standardizing on one supplier is no longer appealing. We’ll save a bundle using the systems we’ve already got and sticking with a best-of-breed approach for financial data management.
- Let’s schedule a roundtable for the IT and Finance teams to strategize on the initiatives we’ve been tasked with by the CEO: Expense and Revenue Management, Performance Management and our adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
Gotta run - my weekly 1-1 meeting with the CEO.
Regards,
The CFO
I bet you never thought this day would come…me writing with good news that my team in Finance will be submitting fewer IT requests. Go figure (pun intended).
Turns out there’s a new way for my staff to manage more of the data, processes and workflows that your team has been handling for us from the finance and BI systems. No more resources needed to manually code and manage this. We can automate most of it while working within the security and data integrity parameters that IT has in place.
Let’s discuss two action items:
- Cancel next week’s sales meeting with our ERP vendor. The allure of standardizing on one supplier is no longer appealing. We’ll save a bundle using the systems we’ve already got and sticking with a best-of-breed approach for financial data management.
- Let’s schedule a roundtable for the IT and Finance teams to strategize on the initiatives we’ve been tasked with by the CEO: Expense and Revenue Management, Performance Management and our adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
Gotta run - my weekly 1-1 meeting with the CEO.
Regards,
The CFO
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Understanding the Impact of New Technologies on BI
"Rather than relying solely on a rigid metaphor like data warehousing, BI needs the ability to access data anywhere it can be found and to perform integration on the fly, if necessary. Locating the right information to solve problems must be a semantic process, not requiring knowledge of data structures or canonical forms."
A long-standing concern between business teams and IT is the question "Have we spent the past years creating some monolithic solution that is now unmanageable?" Can it come close to addressing the needs of the current and future business? Have the Business Intelligence (BI) systems that we've created become rigid metaphors, as Neil Raden proposes that data warehouses have become?
Implementing a BI system has always been hard and costly. But the value, once up and running, can be enormous. Insight isn't something to be taken lightly; it can change the very nature of how a business is run. It is no wonder, then, that the markets for BI and performance management solutions are expanding rapidly.
The business needs for BI are going far beyond traditional analysis and reporting; companies are now expecting information access in real-time, across global constituencies, and beyond the limitations of financial data, or for that matter, data itself. The BI systems that we built over the past decade simply may not scale to meet today's requirements.
New technologies such as software as a service (SaaS) are impacting the very nature of software development and delivery, and are also helping to shape the future direction of BI. Even large vendors such as SAP and Oracle are testing out the on-demand waters, SAP with its' 'Business by Design' on-demand solution, and Oracle delivering Oracle Hyperion On Demand. While SaaS has yet to experience broad acceptance in the marketplace, niche BI companies such as LucidEra, Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics and PivotLink are gaining customers with their on-demand offerings, and open the market to small and mid-size (SMB) companies.
Open source BI offerings may provide a clue into another alternative direction for BI markets – again with potential business benefit. As the time and cost of implementing and supporting BI solutions are reduced, so too will the bar lower to a level where SMBs can take advantage of BI, while larger companies can customize solutions and extend analytics across the enterprise. BI will broaden from the hands of the few into the hands of many.
While the new technologies broaden the BI market offerings, they exacerbate the issues companies currently face managing financial data across increasingly stratified and expanding markets. We are already dealing with a crisis in data management. Critical financial information is stored in proprietary BI systems and cannot be easily extracted or combined with operational data. Information from all source systems must be auditable and compliant. It must exist in standard structures that will support future development of combined data with other content sources. Before we can truly scale to meet the coming needs of the BI market we must create a reliable and consistent method for moving and managing data across the enterprise.
The increasingly complex business demands on BI systems are a further validation of the success and relevance of the market. We can learn from other rapidly-evolving technologies that have gone through major expansions as a result of their cumulative relevance. The Web, and Web based standards come to mind as an example of a technology that has successfully transitioned into a much higher form of relevance. Standardization, interoperability, and security are core Web concepts. Before we can hope to truly leverage new technologies, we must overcome the limitations that we've built into our existing BI systems, ensuring standardized data access mechanisms, real-time, secure access to data, and a framework that will extend into the next realm of BI technology development, and Radan's vision of "Locating the right information to solve problems must be a semantic process, not requiring knowledge of data structures or canonical forms."
Neil Raden, Intelligent Enterprise, Business Intelligence 2.0
A long-standing concern between business teams and IT is the question "Have we spent the past years creating some monolithic solution that is now unmanageable?" Can it come close to addressing the needs of the current and future business? Have the Business Intelligence (BI) systems that we've created become rigid metaphors, as Neil Raden proposes that data warehouses have become?
Implementing a BI system has always been hard and costly. But the value, once up and running, can be enormous. Insight isn't something to be taken lightly; it can change the very nature of how a business is run. It is no wonder, then, that the markets for BI and performance management solutions are expanding rapidly.
The business needs for BI are going far beyond traditional analysis and reporting; companies are now expecting information access in real-time, across global constituencies, and beyond the limitations of financial data, or for that matter, data itself. The BI systems that we built over the past decade simply may not scale to meet today's requirements.
New technologies such as software as a service (SaaS) are impacting the very nature of software development and delivery, and are also helping to shape the future direction of BI. Even large vendors such as SAP and Oracle are testing out the on-demand waters, SAP with its' 'Business by Design' on-demand solution, and Oracle delivering Oracle Hyperion On Demand. While SaaS has yet to experience broad acceptance in the marketplace, niche BI companies such as LucidEra, Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics and PivotLink are gaining customers with their on-demand offerings, and open the market to small and mid-size (SMB) companies.
Open source BI offerings may provide a clue into another alternative direction for BI markets – again with potential business benefit. As the time and cost of implementing and supporting BI solutions are reduced, so too will the bar lower to a level where SMBs can take advantage of BI, while larger companies can customize solutions and extend analytics across the enterprise. BI will broaden from the hands of the few into the hands of many.
While the new technologies broaden the BI market offerings, they exacerbate the issues companies currently face managing financial data across increasingly stratified and expanding markets. We are already dealing with a crisis in data management. Critical financial information is stored in proprietary BI systems and cannot be easily extracted or combined with operational data. Information from all source systems must be auditable and compliant. It must exist in standard structures that will support future development of combined data with other content sources. Before we can truly scale to meet the coming needs of the BI market we must create a reliable and consistent method for moving and managing data across the enterprise.
The increasingly complex business demands on BI systems are a further validation of the success and relevance of the market. We can learn from other rapidly-evolving technologies that have gone through major expansions as a result of their cumulative relevance. The Web, and Web based standards come to mind as an example of a technology that has successfully transitioned into a much higher form of relevance. Standardization, interoperability, and security are core Web concepts. Before we can hope to truly leverage new technologies, we must overcome the limitations that we've built into our existing BI systems, ensuring standardized data access mechanisms, real-time, secure access to data, and a framework that will extend into the next realm of BI technology development, and Radan's vision of "Locating the right information to solve problems must be a semantic process, not requiring knowledge of data structures or canonical forms."
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Integrating Information Across Vendor Applications
Whoever wins this week's performance management battle in the ongoing acquisition war, Doug Henschen's blog post (Intelligent Enterprise, 3/10/2008) is a direct reflection of one of the key issues that performance management customers face: While companies like Oracle and SAP buy up vendors and consolidate to strengthen and extend their market offerings and positions, their customers, many of which we share in common with these vendors, are involved in exactly the same process. The untold story from a customer’s perspective is that the mergers and acquisition strategies of vendors create enormous challenges for departments that are tasked with ensuring compliance, stability, and maintainability of critical systems and financial data. These customers have to synthesize duplicate applications and the requirement to integrate systems without disrupting workflow or degrading the integrity of data.
Performance Management systems hold some of the most important data in an organization - and key executives sign their names on dotted lines every quarter guaranteeing that the information is reflected accurately. The value of the information locked into source performance management systems drives the need to elegantly move data and metadata between performance management applications and reporting tools within the larger financial data warehouse.
Perhaps the concept of "unifying the full range of financial and operational processes in a single stack" should be reserved for that Utopian environment where there are no mergers, no acquisitions, no disparate systems, and no legacy applications. For customers in today’s global business environment, a solution that can move data, metadata and security out of these source performance management systems and into the larger financial data warehouse, where the information can be shared among a variety of vendor tools, as needed, is the hill that must be conquered in the vendor wars.
(cross-posted on Intelligent Enterprise)
Performance Management systems hold some of the most important data in an organization - and key executives sign their names on dotted lines every quarter guaranteeing that the information is reflected accurately. The value of the information locked into source performance management systems drives the need to elegantly move data and metadata between performance management applications and reporting tools within the larger financial data warehouse.
Perhaps the concept of "unifying the full range of financial and operational processes in a single stack" should be reserved for that Utopian environment where there are no mergers, no acquisitions, no disparate systems, and no legacy applications. For customers in today’s global business environment, a solution that can move data, metadata and security out of these source performance management systems and into the larger financial data warehouse, where the information can be shared among a variety of vendor tools, as needed, is the hill that must be conquered in the vendor wars.
(cross-posted on Intelligent Enterprise)
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