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3 Ways to Survive in 2012 (or How to Do Even More with Even Less)

tracy.bishop — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:07:02 +0000

by Tracey Bishop and Glenn Wirrick

A study of the headlines of business and finance journals at the New Year reveals wide usage of terms such as “Eurozone collapse”, “Uncertainty” and, “Avoiding Risk”. Many finance directors are heading into the New Year with a focus on cutting costs and increasing cash flow to strengthen balance sheets and avoid risk.

As the global economic storms continue to rage in 2012, finance directors and their teams will be presented with a new level of challenge. However, those challenges could also be stimulating and allow finance professionals to bring all their skills to bear to help their businesses survive.

Undoubtedly, finance teams will need to move away from just “keeping score” and offer the business better insight into how to cut costs and stay competitive. Here are three ways to help you survive in 2012:

1) Accurately analyse your spend and revenue – Even finance directors of long standing businesses now need to unearth their entreprenurial spirit and look at new, creative ways to cut costs and offer ideas for revenue generation. Every stone should be turned to look at new ways to improve the margins — and this means looking at your financial information from new angles.

Maintain a holistic view of the organisation’s financial performance so ideas for new growth as well as cost reduction can quickly be spotted and offered to the management team.
Compare departments side by side to get new insights into spend and revenue.
Be prepared to advise management on the most profitable and saleable products so marketing and sales can be directed accordingly.
Examine recent acquisitions for hidden costs or cost saving practices, which could be rolled out across the company.
Keep a close eye on departments that have less control over their budgets. This is not the year for surprises.

2) Monitor your Payables activity – Are you getting the most value from your providers? An early spring clean of the payables function will allow you to review payment terms, discounts, and controls.

Make sure you know which suppliers have favourable payment terms and make sure they are justified by better prices or contract terms.
Identify any areas where available discounts are not taken. Again, if your procurement team have taken the trouble to negotiate these they should have a significant value to the business and every discount lost will require more sales to compensate.
Make sure your payables controls are working effectively. Payables can be a high-risk area in terms of fraud, but overbearing controls can slow the process and impact cash flow by imposing too much manual intervention and placing too many invoices on hold. Run regular checks to see how many invoices are on hold, how long invoices are taking to process and to monitor the efficiency of your payment runs.
De-clutter your supplier files. Those unassuming supplier records set up over time for specific purchases can result in all sorts of temptations for contract leakage and additional purchase costs. Keep your supplier records to a minimum to avoid unnecessary costs.

3) Improve cash management – Often, 80% of your biggest potential cash improvements are available from your top 20% of customers.

Make sure you can easily identify your best and worst customers in terms of spend and payment compliance.
Monitor Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), adherence to credit terms, and late pays. Improving overall DSO by even two to three days can deliver dramatic cash flow improvements.
Check your Receivables processes regularly to identify bottlenecks which can affect cash flow. For example, disputed invoice resolution, too much use of credit memos, etc.

Here is some interesting research on this topic:

Author: tracy.bishop

Ever optimistic and always looking for ways to make the day to day life of finance staff easier. My career as a practising public sector accountant followed by 12 years as an Oracle ERP consultant has led me nicely to my perfect job! I am the EBS Product Manager at Insightsoftware.com where I get to define our reporting solutions for Oracle Financials users. When I'm not doing that you can find me running our cattery at home, www.kandaharcattery.co.uk, acting as groom to my daughter and her pony or dancing madly as a groupie to one of my husband's bands, e.g http://www.honeyryder.com/.

Product of the Year awarded to InsightSoftware!

Kathy Wells — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:47:57 +0000

The Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) in the UK gave InsightSoftware the Gold Award for Product of the Year.

We are honored to receive this award, and graciously accept it, as it highlights our focus squarely on providing value to our customers.

The awards were chosen by Oracle users to reward organisations that provide innovative products to Oracle customers, and that provide extraordinary service and contribution to customer members over the last year, respectively.

Thank you to those of you who voted for us! We are not here to make reporting better, faster, stronger. We are here to change the rules so ERP reporting is a no-brainer.

We love feedback! Please keep sharing your thoughts, input and ideas.

“As a software company, we strive daily to create innovative ways to make our customers’ jobs easier,” says Paul Sutton, general manager of InsightSoftware.com’s EMEA operations. “We don’t look for just better and faster ways of doing the same thing, rather we look for a way to change the game. This award is a vote of confidence from the industry and our customers. We celebrate this recognition and remain committed to continued innovation.”

Author: Kathy Wells

High tech marketer with over 20 years experience and proven results. Always keeping it fresh as a social media geek and frequent early adopter. Strong customer relationship builder, driving tangible ROI our customers. Education includes: MBA in International Business, Masters of Arts in Psychology and Interpersonal Communication (in progress).

OpenWorld 2011 – It’s all getting quicker.

Kathy Wells — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:14:37 +0000

Tracy Bishop, product manager & former Oracle consultant

by Tracy Bishop, product manager and former Oracle consultant

My favourite new song over the Summer months was called Quicker by I Blame Coco. “Quicker” seems to be the theme of the moment. Apple are releasing iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S which promise faster performance. And the main message at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 was that everything can now be much, MUCH faster.

Exa-everything
This is the first time I’ve attended Openworld as a non-Oracle employee. It gave me a considerably different perspective. There was a great deal of focus on hardware and database aspects. “Exa-everything” was the darling of the show and managed to get a mention in most of the sessions I attended, even those which were Applications specific rather than technical.

Oracle Financials
As an accountant I was mainly interested in the applications side of things, especially Oracle financials. Most of what I heard here I had heard at previous conferences. There was a good high level session on “What’s next for financial management solutions at Oracle?”. This was an overview of the new things for each of the four financial product sets and included a presentation from Deloitte on their CFO survey. That implied there is lots to worry about in the global economy and most CFO’s feel they have squeezed and squeezed efficiencies and cost savings out of their organisations already. So…. would CFO’s be interested in the “do it quicker messages ?

Extreme BI
If they were, an interesting session was “Extreme BI: Real-Time Analytics with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Business Intelligence Apps”. I was intrigued by the title as Oracle have chopped and changed their message about real time versus datawarehouse reporting over the past few years. Could it be that we were to see a return to real time business intelligence? No – this was just a case of “quicker” in action. It showed how Exadata and its Exa cousins can really come into their own as a platform to create a very fast performing e-Business suite. It turns out that OBIEE has not moved to become a real time tool but if Exadata is used along with plenty of tuning, parallelism, etc., the improvement in performance can gives users the feel of real time. Of course there is a price tag and an organisation needs a big budget or needs to be big enough to generate a business case to show a return on investment over time. Maybe something for the CFOs of really big companies then, but it looks like more of the same for the rest.

Quick Hits Are What We Need Right Now
I am convinced though that there are still ways to squeeze the last drops of efficiency out of an organisation by using the information Oracle e-Business suite provides. This belief was reinforced at a session on the GRC products run jointly between Oracle and KPMG. Tactical reporting, rather than BI, on Oracle financials can reveal interesting trends and details to help find savings, e.g. by identifying where overpayments are occurring, finding fraud, early identification and correction of errors, etc. This may sound like small fry but based on KPMGs example, a company with a 5% profit margin losing $1million through overpayments and fraud would need to generate an additional $20million in sales to compensate. So, for me, quick and easy ways to get to that information and put it right will be the things to help CFOs and their accountants.

And, just to bring everything round in a circle…. the singer of the “Quicker” song i love so much is Coco Sumner, daughter of Sting, one of the headlining performers at OpenWorld this year.

If you attended, what are your impressions of OpenWorld this year? If you didn’t attend, what have you heard about the event that you found of interest? Please comment – I’m curious about your thoughts.

Author: Kathy Wells

A Real Customer Conversation

Kathy Wells — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:06:48 +0000

A customer relayed to me a conversation that took place in his organization recently. It is such a common conversation that I thought it would be worthwhile to share.

Tom: Have you seen this reporting tool that says it can get real-time information directly from JDE?

Joe: Yea, I saw it last year at a trade show. It’s just marketing baloney.

Tom: Me too. But I’m having so much trouble getting timely, updated reports that I’m thinking about trying it.

Joe: Whatever. It’s your shop.

A few weeks later…..

Tom: Hey Joe. Check this out. Remember what you said about Insight Reporting? It’s for real!

Joe: Let me see.

Joe: Wow! This is amazing. Wait — how long have we been trying to do this, again?

As a society we are inundated with messages of being more beautiful, stronger, smarter, etc. It’s become hard to believe something that seems “too easy” could be for real.

So when I hear customers talking about getting what they want, it’s something worth sharing. InsightSoftware customers tell us regularly how reports that took days and sometimes months now take 5 minutes to run. And they can drill into the data real-time — something they have never been able to do before.

Is it the best thing since sliced bread? Will it keep your attention at Super Bowl half time? Will someone tell two friends, who will tell two friends, and so on ? (Shout out to the 70’s and Farrah Fawcett).

Who knows. The real question is whether it makes YOUR life easier. And that’s all that matters.

Author: Kathy Wells

Can users fall back in love with their financial system?

tracy.bishop — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:43:29 +0000

By Tracy Bishop, Insight for EBS Product Manager and former Oracle Consultant

Fall in love with your Oracle Financial Reporting again

I’ve spent this week working with some of our existing customers to give them an update on the latest release of our reporting software – Insight for EBS.

Over the years I’ve worked with many clients using Oracle financials and I’ve seen the initial heady excitement when a system is installed and how that can eventually turn to frustration and disgruntlement when users become familiar with the constraints of their implementation.

In many ways it’s a bit like a marriage with the intense courtship, the exchanging of vows and then the eventual hum drum of married life along with its niggles and annoyances.

I realized this more than ever when visiting with our customers this week. The focus of our new release is to broaden our subledger reporting, i.e. Payables, Receivables and Assets. The users in these areas are often the poor relations when it comes to reporting, making their relationship with Oracle Financials in need of some serious therapy. Especially as these are often areas targeted for efficiency drives so they need to know what is going on and where the improvements can be made.

We discussed the challenges with identifying bottlenecks in processes, stray transactions, internal controls as well as more detailed requirements such as aged debt by GL segments, analyzing transaction notes, identifying non-compliant payables invoices, etc.

But, with some robust flexible reporting templates and a tool which does not require any of the usual implementation and training efforts, these users, (including a contractor who had never seen the tool before and had been brought in to help one organization sort out its debt collection) were able to get at that information in minutes, and any other questions they needed to ask of their subledgers.

Suddenly people were genuinely enthused and excited by the information they had at their fingertips and could not wait to get back the office to use it.

So, perhaps with the occasional effort to spice things up, users really can fall back in love with their financial system.

Tracy

PS – we’ll be at Open World, booth #3409, so if you need some and your Oracle financial system need some relationship counseling come and see us !

Author: tracy.bishop

Announcing InVision – InsightSoftware’s 2012 User Conference

Kathy Wells — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:18:17 +0000

The dates have been set. The hotel secured. The content is being finalized. And there is quite a buzz around InsightSoftware as we get ready to knock your socks off at our upcoming user conference.

You will:

Hear about our product vision and roadmap.
See sneak previews of upcoming innovative enhancements that will make your life easier.
Have the chance to speak directly with developers, support and education staff.
Network with peers who are solving the same problems you face every day.

Join the fun on February 26-28, 2012 in Scottsdale, AZ at the Fairmont Princess Hotel for 2-1/2 days of getting more out of your ERP, and we guarantee it will be worth your time.

Stay tuned – more details available shortly!

Author: Kathy Wells

InsightSoftware.com Welcomes New Customer Services Director

Kathy Wells — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:32:49 +0000

We live and die based on how well we serve our customers. So when our VP of Customer Services, Wendy Harmon, moved to our UK office to manage our product development team, we went searching for the best of the best to fill her role.

We looked for someone with ERP expertise, vast software experience in customer service, critical account management, support team management and escalation management. We wanted someone who thrives on solving difficult problems/issues, building strong teams, and working with internal departments to achieve the goals of all of our customers. Tough shoes to fill.

InsightSoftware.com Customer Services Director

Our rigorous search turned up our new Director of Customer Services for North America, Janet Tinucci.

We welcome Janet to our team. Most recently having worked at The Shaw Group (an InsightSoftware.com customer for many years), Janet was the Information Technology Director specializing in HR, Payroll and Labor systems. Before that she worked at Oracle (JDE/PSFT) in a variety of roles such as Critical Accounts/Escalations Senior Manager, Development Product Launch Specialist (for HR/PAY), and Worldwide Customer Support Manager.

Not only does Janet know how to solve problems and cultivate optimal customer solutions, she also nurtures her home garden and creates family memories through scrapbooking.

Please join us in welcoming Janet!