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.