Make Decision-Making a Core Competence
by Kathleen RohreckerKnowledge workers have driven more than 70% of the economic growth in the US over the past three decades, and 85% of the new jobs created in the past decade required complex knowledge skills.
Companies that are making decision-making a core competence – even a competitive differentiator – are out-performing their peers. arcplan’s view is that even if complete, actionable data is available for decision-making, biases can cause decisions to become misdirected. On October 20th, arcplan co-sponsored a webinar with Financial Executives International featuring noted writer and speaker Dr. Courtney Hunt titled, “Decision-Making 1.0: The Importance of High Quality Data and Rational, Objective Decision-Making Processes.” Listen to this webinar replay to learn how your organization can make decision-making a core competence.
Click here to register for Part II of our webinar series with FEI on November 18th, “Decision-Making 2.0: How Organizations Can Leverage 2.0 Technologies to Improve Decision-Making and Collaboration.” You don’t need to be a member of FEI to participate.
How to Save Money Without Firing Your Employees
by Kathleen RohreckerI hope you won’t mind a bit of bragging today. We’re excited about yesterday’s CIOUpdate.com article featuring arcplan client Turner Broadcasting titled, “How to Save Money Without Firing Your Employees.” Turner Broadcasting’s VP of Finance, Robert Copenhaver, explained how his group used arcplan Enterprise, which Turner Broadcasting already had in-house, to take a bonus compensation reporting problem that took months to solve each payment period down to a one- to two-week process. arcplan allowed the group to get rid of “dueling spreadsheets,” indecipherable faxes, questionable claims that had little documentation to back them up and “mounds of information that didn’t match up.”
Sales Commission Reporting Costing You a Fortune?
by Kathleen RohreckerWe have a Fortune 500 client whose CFO is responsible for calculating and reporting on all executive compensation because it’s confidential information that only a limited number of people can see. So they had a highly skilled, highly valuable executive doing manual reports in Excel. Another client – a global company with thousands of direct sales reps – had a team of 8 FTEs dedicated to calculating sales compensation payments. So I ask you to consider this question: how much are your sales commission and incentive plans really costing your company?
There is a better way to manage incentive plans – Business Intelligence! If you’re already a BI user, you should have access to:
- A rules-based environment that replaces Excel spreadsheets and improves accuracy and consistency of commission or incentive payments
- A reporting engine that enables teams to look at data any way that is needed: by sales person, period, region, product, customer, etc.
- The ability to tap into multiple data sources and perform what-if scenarios
(Leave me a comment if your BI system isn’t this advanced and you’d like more information about how arcplan can help.)
In the end, your BI system can reduce error rates (overpayments), save you time, and get you real-time visibility into compensation. Take some time to figure out if your organization has a system in place that can improve your sales commission processes or if investing in this area would be wise!
The Case for Supply Chain Quality Management: Part 5 – Success at Graham Packaging
by Kathleen RohreckerThis article wraps up our series on supply chain quality management. Thanks for sticking with us while we explored the need for measuring supplier performance, how to implement a system to track it, and sample metrics to start the process. Today, we’re presenting a success story from our client, Graham Packaging.
Pennsylvania-based Graham Packaging Company manufactures more than 20 billion blow-molded containers annually from 81 plants in 16 countries, generating more than $2 billion in annual sales. The company uses hundreds of vendors in order to support its distributed production facilities and foster competition among vendors. However, in order to maintain high quality standards, Graham Packaging needed a consistent way for the plant managers and the Global Supplier Quality team to collectively drive performance.
The company’s Supplier Quality team worked closely with IT to implement an arcplan-powered Supplier Quality Dashboard and Scorecard that saved millions and vastly improved supplier performance.
The Case for Supply Chain Quality Management: Part 4 – Sample Performance Metrics
by Kathleen RohreckerIn our previous post in this series, we talked about the ingredients needed to create a fact-based culture among your internal supply chain teams and your external constituents (suppliers). Today we’re giving you the goods – sample metrics for your Quality Dashboards and Supplier Scorecards.
There are three critical performance drivers in the supply chain – Cost, Quality, and Time – all of which must be objectively managed. Some lend themselves to quantifiable metrics while others are more qualitative. In either case, supplier quality teams need a dashboard and scorecard(s) that makes all required information accessible and easy to consume. Let’s talk a bit more about cost metrics.
Cost:
As much as 60% of the cost of production is purchased material content and 67% of the cost of poor quality is in the non-materials cost. With the proportionately large amount of money being spent on business processes that support production, both the cost of parts and processes must be managed with metrics such as:
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