Performance Management - Mind The Gap!

In the last few days it would be understandable to ask the question “How much do Irish customers owe us?”. Back comes the answer £10 million.

Then someone does an analysis by country and discovers that there is £10m for “Ireland” but another £5m for “Eire”. It turns out the validation has been changed, and new customers are now Eire, old customers are still Ireland.

Or perhaps the field isn’t validated, and there’s another £2m for variations like [... read more...]

Using Multi-Dimensional Software Tools

Over the last few weeks we’ve looked at various aspects of multi-dimensional software tools, often referred to as Business Intelligence (BI):

[... read more...]

Strategic Business Planning - Turning Ideas into Reality

So you’ve come up with an idea for a business, within a corporate or independently. This may be into an established market, you may be planning to be disruptive by doing things differently in some way, or you want to market some new technology into a totally new market.

Commercialising technology is always interesting, whether it is what you are selling or what you are using to approach a market differently.

You’ve researched [...read more...]

What Makes a Business Dashboard Good or Bad?

42 is the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, according to Douglas Adams in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. But what is the ultimate question?

Good management reporting provides reliable information on a timely basis, relevant to support management decisions. Getting the right information at the right frequency is key.

Dashboards, at the pinnacle of the reporting pyramid, are no exception: [...read more...]

KPIs – What’s Driving Your Business?

Sit down for your weekly business review and there is likely to be a page or screen full of numbers like revenue, order book and profit.

These are measures of results. But are you measuring what is driving your business? These are the true Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), or better called Key Performance Drivers (KPDs).

Depending on your business, these might be [...read more...]