People choose to attend a conference like Adaptive Live for various reasons. This year, some spent four days training, networking and gaining new insights to take on the journey to better planning. My colleagues and I enjoyed the conversations and learned a lot about Adaptive Insights and more importantly, what customers do or need. Every interaction has value at a conference and what you do with that experience is important. Read more
Tag Archive for: Financial Performance Management
When done well, a good financial forecast allows the business to make the right investments at the right time and allows finance to set more accurate expectations with investors. Unfortunately, many financial forecasts do not consider enough variables, consider the market perspective, or have a flexible yet robust process. The future norm for financial forecasting will be a combination of subjective veteran business leader input and advanced financial modeling that coalesce human experience and computational knowledge in a meaningful way. Read more
The recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will undoubtedly have broad implications across the corporate landscape as updates to the tax code will necessitate major changes to certain financial management decisions. Finance needs a solid FP&A modeling foundation in order to lead tax-related decision making within their organizations. While there are many aspects of the tax code that will require in-depth financial impact analyses, changes to the deductibility of capital expenditures has been a particular area of interest for some Ironside clients that invest heavily in fixed assets. Read more
Ironside recently reported a new issue to IBM that is now confirmed as having an impact on all TM1 sites regardless of version. The Ironside Managed Services team uncovered the issue while troubleshooting a client’s environment.
“In our efforts to secure an environment for one of our larger insurance clients, it was noticed that the SSL certificate was going to expire shortly,” said Erik Romanek, Ironside’s Director of Platform and Managed Services. “John Commons, one of Ironside’s platform consultants, worked with IBM to come up with a few solution options. This is just another example of Ironside going the extra mile to make sure the implementations we work on are configured securely and for longevity.” Read more
On April 26th, Ironside hosted a webinar on Rolling Forecast Essentials. Members of our Financial Performance Management team, Mark Flyamer, Senior Consultant and Rich Canale, Solution Architect, discussed the foundation needed to start implementing rolling forecasts work at your organization.
Rich and Mark discussed design techniques to help you expedite rolling forecast models and minimize the hours needed to get a working solution all while preserving the accuracy and integrity of your financial data.
Financial analytics and performance monitoring are vital components in an organization’s success. The ability to review and quickly react to industry and market changes is a critical competitive advantage that requires agile analytics to get right. The rolling forecast is a continuous planning process that provides your organization with just such an analytical vehicle. Extending beyond the traditional fiscal year review, it combines actual data with forecast results across a rolling number of periods to provide a consistent analytic horizon. An organization’s rolling forecast process must support variance analyses of performance versus targets using the most current information. This is necessary if they want to recognize and reflect actionable changes that will keep them on or get them back on course. Read more
Many organizations have adopted monthly or quarterly rolling forecasting as a primary tool for understanding their operational and financial performance. The rolling forecast is a process that includes the continuous evaluation of past results with future expectations across a set number of time periods to analyze trends and help the organization understand its current position. Read more
Last month, we gave you a few summer reading suggestions from our experts, and they were so well-received we decided to bring you three more book recommendations from some more Ironside luminaries. These book recommendations will take you into the final stretch of the season feeling enriched with new insights into organizational growth, analytics strategy, and motivational methods. We hope you enjoy this list as much as you enjoyed the last one. Happy reading! Read more
Ironside, has become the first IBM Business Partner to achieve IBM Gold Software Accreditation in the three major pillars of IBM business analytics software: Business Intelligence (Cognos), Financial Performance Management (TM1), and Predictive Analytics (SPSS). Read more
Employee compensation accounts for most of the expense base for service-oriented companies. The true ‘driver’ for this expense revolves around workforce planning. Creating a projection that matches the size of the workforce to the demands of the business can be a difficult exercise. Like most complex tasks, breaking it down into manageable components makes it easier to implement. This is the core principle behind driver-based compensation planning. Read more
Tag Archive for: Financial Performance Management
Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.