Tag: business intelligence

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Every Business Deserves a Chance to Be Better

Amazon's Domes

Article 1 in 4-part series

Every business owner or manager wants to see growth in revenue and profits, and sustaining a high level of performance requires that the business operate smoothly and without breakage or imbalance. When workers know their jobs and do them well, and when workload performance is regular and timely, the business operation glides.

Yet few organizations fully understand how all of their processes weave together to form the operation, or how changes in workloads and task performance will impact the bottom line. Growing or shrinking workloads, supply chain interruptions and other conditions influence the flow of work in the business, which is why a clear understanding of the workflows and the dynamics of the processes they connect is so essential.

It really comes down to a “degrees of success” question: how much better could the business be?

It is said that the only constant is change, and businesses must find a way to effectively and cost-efficiently meet changing demands and conditions in order to survive.  What frustrates many business owners is that change is generally disruptive to the business, representing a significant challenge when it comes to the development of internal processes, procedures and the workflows which bind them.   At issue is the understanding that proven, structured and repeatable processes help to improve efficiency, yet changing conditions often require changes to these processes.

Creating agility and sustainable value in the organization suggests that guidance for workers, processes and controls, business and system policies, activities and agents and resources all be brought together to form a complete picture of the business and operation.  With this in hand, the business is better able to communicate to each member what is expected of them and when, and to make adjustment or enhancements to how the work flows in order keep moving toward the stated goal.

Informed workflows guide smarter processes, and smarter businesses are more resilient.

Smarter business is built from knowledge and understanding not just of the systems and actors in the enterprise, but of the higher level goals motivating the activity.  In a global economy, where competitive pressures are increasing every day for even the smallest of businesses, making process improvements and creating sustainability become as much a focus for the business as growth once was.

Developing strategies for retaining profit margins, improving cash flows, solidifying supply chains and streamlining operational processes is essential when designing the business to handle the stresses of a changing economy. The foundations of such strategies are the people, processes and knowledge in the business, and the workflows which tie them together into a cohesive, high performance enterprise.

What comes as a surprise to many businesses is that their efforts to structure the work – defining the activities which string together to form the process, or connecting the processes in a workflow – often reveals why certain things are done the way they are. Where process and workflow modeling most frequently addresses the “what” and “how” of the business, less often is the “why” question directly approached. The discovery of “why” is sometimes a revelation which comes unexpectedly, providing insight into areas of the business where change could be made, leading to improved process performance and moving the operation closer reaching its goals.

With the popularity and proliferation of online applications and cloud computing, many businesses have transformed how they manage activities, people and resources.

The adoption of individual apps to support specific business activities and processes is increasing, where solutions are often loosely connected, integrating or syncing only selected data used for a particular purpose.  The Internet-connected marketplace has introduced both opportunity and challenge for businesses of all sizes, and much of the focus has been placed on the management and control of digital documents and data.

Centralized electronic document management has been commonly used in business for many years, yet has not always been viewed as an essential technology to apply in the context of organizing and structuring the workflows in the business.

Particularly in situations where apps and activities are not always directly connected to their dependent or resultant processes, electronic document management and integration of external data elements become critical to structuring the flow of work.

In structuring workflows and documents systems which support the various business processes, the organization will find that it has developed the means to collect and memorialize the business and operational knowledge owned only by individuals in the business.

Gathering together the “tribal knowledge” from users in the business – investing the learning and experience of individuals into the DNA of the business processes and organization of work– is an essential element in crafting meaningful workflows which capture the human-based considerations that are often overlooked.

When individual knowledge becomes business knowledge and is turned into documents, systems and structured processes which guide the operation, results are able to be reproduced more consistently and reliance upon individuals is reduced significantly.

Business processes are now considered to be corporate assets which require consistent and ongoing management and review.

Because business is not stagnant, processes and workflows will necessarily evolve as conditions change. Managing these processes and the workflows which attach them is an iterative process that must be actively pursued in order to ensure that evolving approaches don’t fail to support higher level business objectives.

While an electronic document management solution may address many of the challenges involved in working with large volumes and varieties of documents and data, there are few DM products on the market which can approach the full realm of business workflows and how they are impacted by business or data-driven events or by the availability of people or resources to facilitate the process.

Businesses must not only structure their documents and data, but also their workflows necessary to support the various processes and should seek to normalize those workflows as much as possible. Through a standards-based approach to workflow development, businesses are able to develop a consistent and methodical approach to the work which results in more predictable and consistent outcomes.

The workflow “engine” is truly the workhorse in the business, connecting the people, activities and information required to fulfill each required task.

Fueled by stored documents, data and business policy, workflows inform the organization on the effectiveness of applied resources, events and agents. Not only providing a basis for measuring process effectiveness, structuring all workflows in the business often reveals why certain previously unrecognized processes occur.

Sometimes referred to as “process mining”, activity monitoring and regular workflow and process evaluation allows the business to develop greater understanding of the rationale it must apply to detect or diagnose processes which deviate from the desired path and cause the business to track away from its strategic goals.

Exact Synergy is the workflow engine which powers global businesses and drives performance.

The business fundamental framework of Synergy allows organizations to structure the entire realm of business activities and provide digital workflows and automation to enhance productivity and ensure accuracy at every step. The core of Synergy connects and tracks the entities, transactions and documents associated with every aspect of the business.

Recognizing that business happens with people, systems and processes, Synergy is the tool organizations use to describe the various entities, actions and requests involved in performing the business, guiding process performance with meaningful workflows which clearly communicate to each participant what is expected from them, when it is expected, and even how to perform.

While essential business needs are met with the initial installation, Synergy is extensively configurable and customizable, considering all areas of the enterprise and offering functionality to support a vast array of requirements.  A business may use the solution in a limited capacity, guiding certain HR and other back-office functions, or it can be applied to the entire business and operation, spanning departments and locations, joining processes and acquiring data which might otherwise remain unmanaged and disconnected.

Synergy helps businesses keep actions and decisions aligned, sharpening the competitive edge.

Synergy’s framework combines entity management, process governance and strict security and data controls with a presentation which allows for everyone in the business to view and manage their workloads quickly and directly. Synergy provides each user with the information they need to get their job done without complication or interference, providing the views and access to increase process effectiveness and supporting the most efficient flow of work through the business.

If actions and decisions inside a company aren’t aligned, processes are disrupted and the competitive edge gets lost. With a more intelligent approach to enabling and managing the work flowing through the enterprise, businesses can be smarter and introduce new value for those involved with them.

Make Sense?

J

Read the Introduction: Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

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Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

You Deserve To Know About Things That Will Make Your Business Better

Every business in the marketplace, from freelancer and entrepreneur to the largest of enterprises, is facing tremendous pressure to change how they do business. Workers demand more options for balancing business with personal life; consumers demand more and different modes of interaction; and business stakeholders continue to demand positive performance even as the pace of change increases.

Digital, social and mobile aren’t fringe considerations in business any more.

People use their phones all the time to do all sorts of things, and a lot of the time those “things” impact the business. From apps and processes that support how work gets done to the policies that guide various aspects of operation and interaction, businesses are discovering that embracing digital workflows and emerging operating models is the new imperative. Every interaction is a transaction, and there are many possible actors collaborating on each one. How well understood is this activity within the business?

From within and without businesses are forced to react to various influences shaping user and consumer behavior, adjusting their processes and creating new core workflows to address digital data, online, social and mobile models that were once considered to be more fringe than foundation. Few businesses, particularly those smaller companies where only one or a few participants do all the work, have a central framework in place to support the vast array of processes and tasks they perform, and even less to help adjust to changing business requirements.

Relying more on individual knowledge than documented processes and structure, small businesses are generally able to retain their agility only as long as they also retain their small size.

What is usually missing in the small business is a foundational workflow system and framework which sets the table for future improvements within the business, and establishes the flexibility to support faster execution while saving costs and reducing investment.

Most business owners don’t consider a workflow-driven system to be an imperative, focusing more on the solutions which address specific operational tasks and activities. This approach may meet business needs for a short time, but the sprawl and distribution of business data and activities enabled with the bolt-on “app” approach often fragments things rather than tying them closely together.

Doing things right in the beginning saves time, effort and money compared to fixing things later.

Businesses should create an organizational structure and employee culture that is “process aware”, developed and built on the solid foundation of structured workflows.  This gives the entire organization a visible basis for improvement at any level, allowing a focus on work attitude and operations that are positive and healthier for the company.

It has been proven time and time again that implementing a flexible framework for structuring workflow within the business will help the enterprise improve performance, undertake efforts to support better decision-making, and achieve a competitive advantage. The structure, crossing all functional boundaries and taking a holistic view of the processes, helps ensure that stakeholder perspectives are aligned, makes sure that everyone has a clear understanding of how processes are undertaken and why, and ultimately focuses all organizational efforts towards the right goal.

This is the introductory article in a series which will discuss the values of a structured workflow solution applied to small and growing businesses and why every business large or small should immediately implement such a system.

The discussion focuses on a solution which I believe presents the framework and extensibility required to address the essential needs of business process management along with the flexibility in design to address more unique and sophisticated flows and integrations.

Meet Exact Synergy Enterprise.

The series will discuss WHY businesses must consider implementing workflow and process management and how Synergy meets those needs.  Further, we’ll take a look at a successful QuickBooks consultant and developer who implements Synergy internally and for their clients. That article explores how their Synergy-founded professional time and billing solution works with QuickBooks, addressing time and resource management requirements that other solutions couldn’t provide.

The discussion then addresses how bookkeepers, consultants and other QuickBooks advisors can quickly and easily implement a structured workflow solution that delivers immediate value to the business. With out-of-the-box functionality to address essential business processes and activity management including CRM, document management, human resources management and more, there is little or no configuration required making the solution useful on the first launch.

The final article takes a look at Synergy implemented in a business, demonstrating the extensive ability for the system to be custom configured directly by the customer. It is the ability to be customized easily, meeting specific process requirements and connecting to the applications and data that round out the operations that makes Synergy particularly powerful and a key component to enabling a successful transformation into an agile, high performance business in the digital age.

syn·er·gy

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

 cooperation interaction, cooperation, combined effort, give and take

 

Make Sense?

J

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The nasty surprises hackers have in store for us in 2018

“Hackers are constantly finding new targets and refining the tools they use to break through cyberdefenses. The following are some significant threats to look out for this year.

More huge data breaches

The cyberattack on the Equifax credit reporting agency in 2017, which led to the theft of Social Security numbers, birth dates, and other data on almost half the U.S. population, was a stark reminder that hackers are thinking big when it comes to targets. ..

Ransomware in the cloud

… The biggest cloud operators, like Google, Amazon, and IBM, have hired some of the brightest minds in digital security, so they won’t be easy to crack. But smaller companies are likely to be more vulnerable, and even a modest breach could lead to a big payday for the hackers involved.

The weaponization of AI

This year will see the emergence of an AI-driven arms race. Security firms and researchers have been using machine-learning models, neural networks, and other AI technologies for a while to better anticipate attacks, and to spot ones already under way. It’s highly likely that hackers are adopting the same technology to strike back…”

Source: The nasty surprises hackers have in store for us in 2018

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Cloud and Digital are Driving Change in Professional Practice

Accounting and Finance Professionals: Cloud and Digital are Driving Change in Professional Practice

Accountants and financial consultants working in public practice are experiencing a revolutionary change, evolving from documents and paper-based processes with after-the-fact reporting to real-time business management and providing services which support daily decision-making.  The underlying cause for this evolution in business accounting is the technology: cloud and collaborative computing models are enabling much closer and regular interaction between accounting professionals and the businesses they serve. Even more, technology is taking its proper place in automating once tedious activities, allowing professionals to focus on causes and results rather than on transactions.

What is the real impact this is having on the accounting profession?  It’s forcing a new focus and attention on change management within the practice, and is causing professionals to recognize the requirement for standardization of processes and development of controls which are the foundations for creating sustainability in a business.  The goal now is placing reliance on process rather than people, which establishes the basis for intelligent automation.  Standardization of processes does not require that the firm lose its personality.  Rather, the mission at hand is to imbue the organization with its unique flavor and approach and to use process automation to develop and support consistency in the functions performed.

While cloud computing models allow accounting and finance professionals to work closer with their business clients, it is important that the practice look at those client interactions and develop standards for processes supporting frequently performed functions.  These operations generally represent the activities within the firm which generate the highest levels of profitability due to the consistency in approach and repetition of tasks, and are the activities to apply intelligent automation to first.  Those activities or engagements which represent the “one-offs” are often the most costly for the firm to perform, and therefore may not be the most profitable of activities and are certainly the most challenging to support with any significant level of automation.  It is in this area where AI will find useful value in the practice, where a more informed answer than simple process automation is required.

The surprising finding when looking at many professional practices with more than one partner/professional involved is that these firms often fail to develop even the most basic of standard processes which apply throughout the firm.  Rather, each partner or professional has “their way” of handling things, which challenges the supporting personnel as they try to deal with multiple working methods. The result is a lack of consistency in the service delivery to the clientele and reduced productivity and profitability for the firm.

The thing that these firms are failing to recognize – the light bulb over their heads that just isn’t lighting up – is that cloud computing and collaborative working models aren’t designed just to enable and facilitate a closer working relationship with clients.  They’re also able to be applied inside the professional practice, enabling a more productive and efficient workflow which addresses the strengths and capabilities of the entire organization. And it doesn’t stop there.  Businesses are relying upon their accounting professionals to provide guidance and develop controls and standards to support the client transformation from paper-based to digital operations, and embracing the entire realm of data and interactions associating with the business. Digital transformation in a client business demands transformation in those firms who serve it.

As professionals learn to go deeper in client operations they would do well to look internally, too, exploring how increased attention to process automation and consideration for the firm’s own “digital transformation” might lead to great profitability through market differentiation and improved performance.

Make Sense?

J

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Improving the Business of Art: Making Beautiful Business Decisions

There is a lot more to managing and maintaining an art collection than simply collecting.  In the art business, knowing where something came from, how it got to where it is now (and what it cost to get there), and keeping track of it thereafter requires software and systems to store and manage the information.  A professional art collection management solution will do much more than simply keep an inventory list of items.  This solution must store all the relevant information about the work as well as gather information while facilitating the various business processes relating to activities around the work. The first step to improvement is ensuring all the processes are being facilitated.

Acquiring the item, transporting the item, preparing the item, showing the item, maintaining the item, selling the item… all of these business activities performed must not just be accounted for, they must relate back to the work of art and become part of its historical record. Art tends to move around. Traveling from collector to collector or to different galleries, works of art may change location and ownership or custodial care frequently.  The origin of a work and the tracked purchase history, as well as the history of placements is among the critical information to be stored with each item. This most valuable data is part of the legacy of the work that any professional system should address. If information is power, then better retention and management of information regarding a work makes the entire collection stronger.

The location or exhibition of a work, its purchase history, the related museum and contact records – all this and more must be maintained and managed with each and every item in a collection.  Essential data such as provenance, condition and value is certainly kept for each work, but the key to making a truly useful system for collectors and artists both is the ability to get all the needed data in a single view or report.

Having the inventory information available for invoicing and reporting is one thing, but also being able to connect or identify individual works and collections with relevant contacts is surprisingly valuable. Tracking other information items like costs associated with shipping or framing, or storing both an appraised value as well as an insured value, provides for a comprehensive record of the work and its properties and makes forms and documents preparation not only more accurate but more efficient and useful, too.

Art businesses are like many other “product”-based businesses in that they have e-commerce needs, they build websites to show off their catalogue, they use mobile applications to display items, and they find much higher efficiency and agility when the websites and mobile applications work with the same real-time inventory data that the rest of the system works with.  The goal is to achieve measurable results through improved efficiencies, and that comes from improved information management and integrated systems.  Centralized computing models and connected cloud services establish the foundation.

Cloud hosting, remote access and mobile technologies, and location-based solutions are all part of the package for businesses involved in the business of art these days.  Implementing a hosting solution which enable anytime/anywhere access to business applications and information is often the first key to unlocking the better and more efficient art business.

Whether it is collecting, selling or showing, users involved in the business of art need secure access to all their information whether they’re in the office or not so they have the data needed to support making beautifully intelligent business decisions when it matters most. The rest is just pretty pictures.

Make Sense?

J

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Technology-Enabled Practice is Profitable Practice

A profitable accounting “firm of the future” is not out of reach for even the smallest of professional practices, because it doesn’t take a lot of people to develop a highly efficient and profitable operation.  The key is having the right business foundation – the technology and the concentration on structure and process – which will serve the business for years to come. Profitability is really about effectiveness and efficiency… delivering more value and doing it in a more intelligent manner than the next guy.  This is how the practice not only stays profitable, this is how it beats the competition.

Powered in part by efficiency created with technology-enabled business, professional firms find that they are able to realize increased revenues by billing for services, not by the billable hour.  Data processing and performing the “mechanics” of the bookkeeping process is going by the wayside, with artificial intelligence and automation taking the lead in these areas.  This creates the opportunity for professionals to broaden their scope of service and involvement with business clients.   The higher value work, the tasks that most professionals would rather spend their time on, is now available because the lower value data entry and tabulation is handled electronically.  When accountants are able to spend less time on entering information and more time on evaluation and analysis, business clients find greater value in the insight delivered from the engagement.

It is more than possible for the professional to develop new competencies in business technologies without having to invest the entire practice and put the client base at risk. Hosting and remote access solutions, for example, bridge the gap between on-premises computing and the cloud, delivering the benefits of mobility and anytime/anywhere working models without the complete transition to SaaS applications and web-based frameworks.  This allows the firm to streamline production by taking advantage of connected systems and real-time data, which is at the core of efficiency in business.

The small business market is the economic growth sector, and the number of opportunities being presented to smaller firms is increasingly significant. With the correct technology and approach, small firms are able to compete at levels previously available only to their larger counterparts.  The business of accounting is changing because the technologies supporting it are evolving more rapidly than ever before.  The firms that embrace these changes and use them to improve and streamline practice performance are the firms that will achieve and sustain the highest levels of profitability.

Make Sense?

J