It’s hard to believe it’s been 30 years since the first spreadsheet transformed the way we make business decisions. But perhaps what’s more surprising is that despite the vast sums invested in Business Intelligence, it hasn’t yet displaced this 30-year old technology.
The problem is one of accuracy. It’s a bit like the man who accidentally dropped his keys under his car one night. He was searching for them under a streetlamp. When asked why he wasn’t looking under the car, he replied, “Because the light is better here.”
All-too-many BI solutions make it easy to focus on the wrong things and
draw the wrong conclusions.
By one estimate, 70 percent of companies use BI metrics that aren’t
reliable or statistically valid. Add in siloed, difficult-to-access data, manual and error-prone processes, and overly-burdened IT departments and business managers, and you can see why so many organizations lack the visibility they need into customer satisfaction, supply chain and operational efficiency, marketing and
sales performance, risk and financial results.
It’s no wonder 80 percent of executives say they’re dissatisfied with their ability to plan and forecast.
How many critical business decisions are you still making with
spreadsheets? How often are you caught by surprise when key estimates such as sales, earnings or cash flows miss the mark? Are you drowning in information but still thirsting for insight? Are you really in control of your business?
BI isn’t a technology problem, so it can’t be solved by technology alone. It’s critical, therefore, to shift the focus beyond the efficient delivery of information – a technology-centric tactical approach – to “accuracy in insight” – a strategic approach that places greater emphasis on the value of the information itself.
In order to maximize that value and have confidence in your decisions, you must first have confidence in the underlying inputs and assumptions.
For over 100 years, organizations around the world have relied on KPMG for
accuracy in financial reporting and trust in our business advice.
In a word, the advantage we offer is confidence. Confidence in your insights. Confidence in your decisions. Confidence that you’re driving business
performance. We offer a wide range of BI services, from business-focused advisory services to technical implementation, to help you transform your organization’s information and intelligence capabilities.
We helped an international brewery business align its BI solution to its organizational goals and strategies. We helped reduce 30 ERP instances into one, which in turn has reduced report duplication, increased data transparency, and increased the speed at which they get information. We helped an international oil company eliminate manual processes in data collection and reporting and
inconsistencies in data elaboration.
Now, 43 subsidiaries across 13 countries are supported by a single BI platform.
They can automatically collect data directly from all points-of-sale, and calculate retail profitability with a model that’s unique to the industry.
We helped a large energy company stabilize its planning application. We reduced the total number of applications by more than 50 percent, and the total number of reports from over 700 to under 125. With a significant reduction in application complexity, their support hours are now 15 percent lower and planning cycles are five days shorter.
We helped a major automotive distributor reduce spreadsheet proliferation and decrease decision errors with a new governance model that helps eliminate surprises and increase productivity.
The result is a projected ROI of $6.2 million over 3 years. Contact us, and we’ll show you how KPMG can help you achieve accuracy in insight and drive business
performance through better Business Intelligence.