Gen AI Breakthrough

The Hackett Group European Procurement Advisor Vicky Kavan discusses the results of our new supplier diversity study with Senior Procurement Advisor Elizabeth Zucker and Senior Research Director Amy Hillcox.

The Hackett Group Director Shawn Townsend and Director Istvan Bodo discuss the Q2 2022 refresh of The Hackett Group’s working capital survey, looking at how companies performed in terms of payables, receivables, and inventory over the first half of 2022.

The Hackett Group Principal Vin Kumar talks with MTN Group CPO Dirk Karl about the company’s digital transformation effort in procurement, which won the company a 2022 Digital Award from The Hackett Group.

Associate Principal Linda Copeland and Associate Principal Brian Willson discuss the needs and objectives for financial reporting and financial planning and analysis (FP&A), and how technology can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of both functions.

Understanding the Impact of Hybrid Work Senior Research Director Anthony DiRomualdo provides an overview of results from The Hackett Group’s Hybrid Work study, which looks at the variety of approaches companies are taking and their impact in areas such as productivity, collaboration, corporate culture, and employee retention

Rick Pastore, Senior Director and Technology Research Advisory discusses findings from our recent research looking at "Improving the Stakeholder Experience," including what approaches work best and what distinguishes high-performing companies from their peers.

Rick Pastore, Senior Director, Technology Research Advisor and Michel Janssen, Chief Market Intelligence Officer discuss how companies can more effectively respond to the current downturn, including issues such as inflation and recession, geopolitical turmoil, and the shrinking labor supply.

Show Notes:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast,” where week after week we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. This episode, hosted by Gary Baker, Group Global Communications director at The Hackett Group, highlights an unprecedented threat in the workplace. In this episode, Gary is joined by Rick Pastore, senior research director and IT advisor at The Hackett Group. Also joining the show is Michel Janssen who serves as the chief market intelligence officer at The Hackett Group. Listen as Gary, Rick, and Michel discuss an emerging threat and opportunity facing businesses: the shrinking of the workforce. 

The conversation begins as Michel explains his interest in this problem. Various threats we face include inflation, a recession, and geopolitical turmoil such as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, along with turmoil in China. Michel says that these are not without prece-dent. The business world has faced and overcome similar problems in the past. Creating the perfect storm, however, is a new challenge; something unprecedented. We are facing the shrinking of the workforce. Michel explains that this is going to create a different set of dy-namics, which we’ve never seen before. 

This fourth threat undermines the strategies normally used to deal with the first three threats. It is a challenge for all. It is said that policymakers can’t simply print new workers. Typical mitigation of the first three problems requires a strong workforce. Without workers, issues of inflation, recession, and turmoil are amplified. Busi-nesses cannot delay spending. They must invest in agility. Boosting salaries is important but could make inflation more severe. What can be done?

 After painting a picture of the problem, Gary, Rick, and Michel discuss alternative strategies that are more likely to work. This is not only a challenge; it’s an opportunity. Michel explains that automation is a big part of the solution. Companies must be able to enable and engage an-ywhere, and present opportunities to work from anywhere. Considering the robust populations of India and Africa, the employer discovers new opportunities for the workforce. This will re-quire companies becoming more agile, which includes automating every transaction and developing new technologies to make the workforce and customers more productive. Upgrading to the cloud allows for remote work, as well as redirecting the roles of previous workers, freeing them toward innovation and greater productivity. 

Discover the actions that businesses should take now to wrestle with this issue, as well as tips on retaining current workers. As the episode concludes, key takeaways are offered on how to thrive in this new normal as companies are transformed, using data which unlocks smarter work and building brands which attract talent. This problem is not only a challenge; it’s an opportunity

Linda Copeland, an Associate Principal with The Hackett Group focusing on emerging opportunities for leveraging technology, discusses the increasing focus of companies on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues, and how they can use technology to more effectively drive performance improvements.

Show Notes:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast,” where week after week we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. This episode, hosted by Gary Baker, Global Communications director at The Hackett Group, features Linda Copeland. Linda is an associate principal at The Hackett Group who focuses on emerging opportunities for levering technology. Gary and Linda discuss how planning technology can help companies achieve their environmental, social, and governance goals. This is an area known as ESG.

The conversation begins as Linda explains this emerging topic among firms. ESG stands for three areas of evaluation. Companies can set and achieve goals and standards regarding the environment, social issues, and governance. The market has traditionally been driven by investors and was less focused on social and relational issues. Now, companies that do well from an environmental and social perspective can do better in business. ESG presents three buckets of opportunities for companies to grow. 

Linda gives examples of each area of ESG. Environmentally, companies may track their water usage, energy usage, material usage and recycling. Socially, companies may measure their gender and ethnic equality, and consider the causes which they fund. At a governance level, companies may consider the diversity of their board of directors and whether or not the company is complying with regulatory expectations. As an emerging field, boards are beginning to arise, which provide accountability and feedback for companies on what they should do.

Gary asks Linda what regulations currently exist. Linda highlights regulations in the EU because companies are required to provide disclosure on ESG. She explains that regulations in the U.S. disclosure rules appear to provide more opportunity for investors to pick companies who are meeting needs from a social perspective. As an example, Linda discusses lending requirements tied to ESG metrics. 

Since ESG is an emerging area of responsibility, it is in its infancy stage as it relates to supportive software and technology. Linda presents the best ways to implement ESG standards through leveraging existing products. Using current software, focusing on strategic and financial planning, companies can immediately begin to integrate ESG goals. Listen as Linda highlights and explains a number of ways in which enterprise performance management (EPM) can help groups become more efficient and measure the organization in order to achieve ESG goals. She challenges companies to consider how planning technology can create progress on this emerging topic of interest.

Principal and Technology Transformation Practice Leader Mike Spires talks with Principal and Technology Transformation Cloud Leader Mike Fuller and Senior Director and Digital Transformation Strategist Jay Ruffin about the rationales, benefits, and best practices for multi-cloud environments.

Show Notes:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast,” where week after week we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. Today’s episode is hosted by Mike Spires, who leads the Technology Transformation practice at The Hackett Group. He serves as the emcee for a conversation on what multi-cloud is, some of its advantages and lessons learned from implementing multi-cloud environments. Mike’s guests for the discussion are Mike Fuller and Jay Ruffin, who are, respectively, the cloud lead and cloud partnership lead in The Hackett Group’s Technology Transformation practice.

Turning first to what multi-cloud is and why it is often confused with the hybrid cloud, Mike Fuller explains that the hybrid cloud involves a company using both on-premise data centers and cloud providers. Multi-cloud, on the other hand, involves using multiple cloud providers. The benefits of employing multi-cloud strategies are often simply the ability to best fit a company’s aims.  Sometimes a company may choose a multi-cloud approach in order to put applications and workloads closer to customers. Multi-cloud strategies can help with pricing and workload management, and in the case of global companies, enable compliance with data storage regulation.

Multi-cloud strategies also impact areas of performance such as latency and agility. They bolster latency by meeting customer preferences and ultimately enabling customer-centricity. They foster agility by placing workloads in environments built around product capabilities. Multi-cloud also helps address the problem of unplanned outages. From a return on investment (ROI) perspective, The Hackett Group studies on cloud performance demonstrate that not only is ROI improved 8%-9% by using multi-cloud, but accuracy of forecasting is improved by 8%-12%. Multi-cloud enables companies to deliver benefits more quickly, and it is safer from a security standpoint than hosted on-premise environments. It also enables improvement in reducing the number of security incidents and mean time to detect them over single-cloud environments.      

Of course, when putting a multi-cloud strategy in place, a company must determine what workloads work best in what cloud environments. Different workloads work best with different cloud providers, and in making proper matches, companies must consider things like speed of innovation, staff levels, security levels, and proximity to the customer. In the instance of mobility apps, it’s helpful for performance and scale to work with providers in different geographic locations. Ultimately, the ideal cloud environment match is a fit-for-purpose solution strategically geared toward the application and/or data of the workload being matched. 

Moving forward, the group considers what industries are adapting better and more quickly to cloud use cases, and which industries are lagging behind. Telecommunications, software, and financial services companies are probably the most experienced in leveraging and having success with the cloud, whereas some in the public sector and in consumer goods are less experienced.  The industries generally lagging behind in cloud use are those with less experience in digital transformation. It takes three to four years to really get a handle on cloud use, and cloud is a sort of underbelly for digital transformation.

The Hackett Group Manager Damon Rottermond talks with Director Shawn Townsend and Director Istvan Bodo discuss findings from The Hackett Group’s 2022 Working Capital Survey.

Show Notes

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast,” where week after week we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. Today’s episode is hosted by Damon Rottermond, finance transformation managing consultant at The Hackett Group. He is joined by István Bodó and Shawn Townsend, both directors in The Hackett Group Technology Transformation practice. The discussion today is centered around the key findings of The Hackett Group’s 2021 US Working Capital Survey, how companies fared post-pandemic, what could come next in 2022 and what companies should be doing right now to inflate themselves.

Shawn starts off by sharing that this is the first year since 2010 where the three main measures of working capital all exhibited positive trends. These include days payables outstanding (DPO), days sales outstanding (DSO) and days inventory outstanding (DIO). He states that the most notable improvement this past year was the DIO, which improved by 2%. The three main industries that drive DIO are pharma, oil and gas, and biotech. These improvements more than offset the supply chain issues throughout the year.

Next, DSO improvement saw a 2% improvement as well. The top three industries driving that improvement are airlines, machinery and recreation of products. These industries all have a strong business-to-consumer component and typically fare well through the economic rebound. Lastly, the DPO, or payable side, also saw a .5% day improvement last year even though the rate of improvement has slowed. The slower growth of improvement is driven by two factors: supply chain bottlenecks and companies reaching upper limit of payment extension for the region. Supply chain finance is doing well and driving part of that improvement.

István then describes the best- and worst-performing rank of companies in 2021. The pandemic triggered deterioration in 2020, with airlines, hotels and immigration being the hardest hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. These industries moved from the worst performing to the best performing in 2021. Digitalization and higher margins were behind this economic rebound. A strong demand and use capacity led to higher prices in the airline industry. Internet and catalog retail was one of the top 10 performing industries during the pandemic, but the cash conversion cycle degraded significantly by 13%. Looking ahead, they believe capital restraints will remain in this industry. In addition, there was a cash conversion cycle of deterioration in the categories of household and personal.

In addition, Shawn talks about the change in revenue. Typically, there is a 4%-5% change, but this year they saw a 22% increase. The top three industries driving this change are gas, airlines and mining. These companies not only bounced back, but saw a 12% increase in margin since 2020. These companies manage to remain profitable despite raw material and labor pressures. On the cash on hand side, there has been a sharp increase with 13% of revenue and is almost back to pre-pandemic levels.

Also, despite the revenue increase, excess working capital grew as well in 2021. Excess working capital is the working capital opportunity. The top 1,000 companies have nearly $1.7 trillion in excess working capital, which is up nearly 28% since 2020 from $1.29 trillion. To break down the working capital areas, the opportunity includes $627 billion in inventory, $533 billion in receivables and $498 billion in payables...