2015

A company's ERP system typically represents years of development and investment. Its original focus was efficiently processing transactions and handling data entry, which many of the older packages still do adequately. Where they aren't especially strong is in important ancillary areas like data extraction, data analysis, generating useful reports, and user interfaces that match well with a company's unique workflows.

An excellent post was published several months back that focuses on this simple premise: People don't buy value propositions; they buy problem definitions.

“Excel is like one of those side-road turns you take to avoid congestion on the main road – you speed up for a short while but then get even more stuck than you were before.” – Anonymous

A condition sometimes referred to as Excel Hell causes a downward spiral of inefficiency and disruption related to the use of Excel for collaborative planning. Symptoms include broken formulas, consolidations that choke, multiple versions of the truth, mounting end-user frustration and decisions driven by bad data.

I recently asked a partner at a CPA firm how many important decisions he makes on gut instinct and without using data to support them. He thought about it for a second and said it’s almost entirely gut feel. “I know, not good," he added.

An important consideration when merging two companies that often receives insufficient attention is a review of how information is managed by both firms. Not a review of the IT infrastructure itself, but rather a close examination of how the most valuable, sensitive data residing on a company's infrastructure is handled. If overlooked, the risk of a bad deal increases, especially in today's data-driven business world.

Lean is an approach to ongoing operational improvement and elimination of waste or non-value-added activities, from the viewpoint of customers. On the physical side of a company, these are often easy to identify - excess inventory, process bottlenecks, unnecessary movement of people or goods, etc. On the information side, however, inefficiency and waste are less tangible and harder to spot.