Ask QueBIT About Analytics

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.