Senior Management

As McKesson learned early in the process, driving the process from bottomup without the support from Senior Management creates additional hardships. Organizations that are able to demonstrate a business case for workforce planning and make that case visible to senior leaders will gain support. These organizations need to understand that workforce planning is not an immediate solution to addressing talent gaps.

For each tactic, the owner defines the person responsible, the start date, and the type of program, just as the Senior Management team did in Figure 7. As each tactic is created, users also can enter high-level budget estimates for each initiative (Figure 11). This is the point at which the high-level budget is linked to the strategic plan. The variables (i.e., key business metrics) shown in Figure 11 are defined by the Senior Management team, but operational managers enter the estimates for each activity that they define. The system will consolidate these budget estimates, enabling the departmental managers to see how defined activities will impact revenue and costs.

1. Potential disruption. As with any change in an IT environment or operating structure, especially one with business practice implications, there will likely be growing pains as obsolete practices are updated. New procedures are likely to distress some staff until activities and new reports become familiar. Communication and training will be especially important, as will continuing contact between affected staff and the colleagues that represented their interests during the discussion stages.
2. Need for Senior Management support. High-level support for improvements in information access associated with operational excellence is a critical prerequisite, but initial buy-in (and funding) isn't enough. Senior Management support needs to be ongoing and visible - not just occasional verbal acknowledgement but also active participation to ensure progress. Shifting relationships and responsibilities that may be part of an operational excellence initiative will have potential organizational implications within a company. Senior Management involvement in the process will ensure sensitivity to these issues and help minimize potential resistance to change. Of course, change advocates will also need to be sensitive to (and not frustrated by) what might be perceived as one step backward for every five steps forward in a successful implementation.

At this point, you will be utilizing basic project management processes. The foundation of your ERP implementation needs to be built on sound project management planning - but the execution will require the muscle of your Senior Management champion to make change happen constantly during the project.

Role Requirements Executive / Senior Management Real time Organisational KPI's

Acceptance by the entire sales organisation should contribute to a higher quality pipeline, shorter sales cycles and a "single version of the truth" for all people to access. Senior Management can realize increased revenue because salespeople are making better calls, and the CFO can be confident that the forecast resembles reality.

The development of a strategic plan typically begins with reviewing current performance. This review requires systems that support the detailed analysis of activities and results. From this analysis, Senior Management develops a high-level financial plan, which in a profit driven company would show the returns expected by investors in the medium to long term. Armed with this information, Senior Management can now communicate to operational management the high-level goals to be achieved and the strategic themes to be adopted" for example, "focus on developing existing customer relationships."

Doug Schwinn is an experienced manager with over 15 years of Senior Management and 30 years of information technology experience across various industries and in a global environment. Doug was previously the CIO at Hasbro, as well as other firms including OfficeMax. Doug has successfully implemented organizational change within technical projects to drive efficiencies and long-term return on investment. Doug has experience on the ground as an ex-pat managing organizational change and effectiveness in multi-cultural global companies. As an experienced member of Senior Management teams, Doug has participated in and managed strategic planning projects. Doug has earned his BS and MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Doug Schwinn is an experienced manager with over 15 years of Senior Management and 30 years of information technology experience across various industries and in a global environment. Doug was previously the CIO at Hasbro, as well as other firms including OfficeMax. Doug has successfully implemented organizational change within technical projects to drive efficiencies and long-term return on investment. Doug has experience on the ground as an ex-pat managing organizational change and effectiveness in multi-cultural global

The single most significant reason for the failure of a lean system is not having everybody in the company "on board" the program. More often this breakdown comes from the Senior Management levels. They fail to take the time to fully understand lean, or they assume that the policies don't apply to them and expect that others down the corporate ladder will do it all for them.

The ultimate enterprise solution must be driven not only by your customers' needs, but also by the internal business intelligence needs of manufacturing, i.e., knowing the status of what is where in the process at any given time, and the needs of Senior Management to monitor business performance. Senior Management must be directly involved at the early stages of the process to establish goals and deliverables .Once the goals are identified, it is essential that key and knowledgeable members of management and manufacturing work closely to achieve those goals. In most cases, much of the information necessary to achieve measureable productivity gains already resides in the existing systems (manufacturing and others), so a thorough audit of all systems and functionality should be performed prior to selecting additional technologies to add to the mix.

David Berger, P.Eng. (Alta), Director, Western Management Consultants, Toronto, is a Certified Management Consultant (C.M.C.) registered in Ontario and an adjunct professor at York University in Toronto, where he has taught operations management for the MBA program for 23 years. He has conducted numerous maintenance audits; helped Senior Management develop maintenance strategies involving maintenance, operations, and engineering; assisted companies in implementing process improvement initiatives with significant results; and led a variety of IT projects, from developing a detailed specification to package selection and implementation, for CMMS/EAM, PdM, RCM, and supply chain software. David Berger may be contacted at .

IFRS project leadership should include a senior director of finance, including the vice-presidential level, to ensure team cohesion and progress. The project leader will also oversee the review of potential risks to internal financial controls and gather input from team members on ways to mitigate or eliminate any potential control violations that may emerge. Moreover, the leader will play the central role in assessing project risks and advising Senior Management on the expected operational impact of the transition.

Enhancing command and control over the entire organization for your senior executives Sage CRM Solutions provides your Senior Management with enhanced central control over operations and budgets, helping them to manage these areas more effectively during challenging times. Reporting and dashboards provide instant insight into business performance across multiple criteria. Senior managers have the ability to validate forecast data with full drill-down to the underlying opportunities. Real-time visibility on revenue and budget variance ensures that decisions are based on accurate information, and corrective action can be taken earlier in the cycle when it has maximum impact. Integrated with your back-office applications, CRM provides a complete view of the business and streamlined end-to-end business management capabilities.

• Senior Management commitment and involvement

While there have been many flavors of the role over the course of business history, the Chief Financial Officer traditionally has been seen as the head of the accounting department, responsible for adding up the numbers and delivering them to the board of directors and Senior Management team. The CFO's job was to make sure the numbers were correct, and served up in a timely fashion. They would have to stand up to auditors, analysts, shareholders, and the IRS. Beyond that, he or she had to deal with accountabilities such as governance and compliance, borrowing and repaying debt, mergers and acquisitions — all complex processes, but still typically in the context of managing the mechanics of a process.

Creating valuable wins early on is critical to the success of a BI or PM initiative. BI and PM generate the most returns the more broadly they are deployed and adopted, so it's helpful if the CFO's office or investment committee understands the value of these applications when it comes time for investments in new software seats or training. Early projects should address a broken workflow or management blind spot that is easily fixed with automation of reporting or analysis. The keys here are to select something small in scope, which is readily fixed, has little operational risk, and will catch the eye of Senior Management. For example, one company used the planning functionality within IBM Cognos 8 BI to improve the budgeting process in one subsidiary while maintaining the old workflows in parallel.

It is clear that regulatory risk is an activity that attracts the support of senior managers, and to which companies are prepared to devote substantial financial resources. Asked about the factors that might hinder their regulatory risk efforts, insufficient budget and inadequate support from Senior Management score towards the bottom of the list. These findings suggest that business leaders recognise the importance of the issue, but also that there is little appetite for scaling back expenditure on managing the risks.

A plan to compile and advertise the benefits (return on investment) of a data quality project deserves strategic consideration. This falls in the stewardship factor because it is the data stewards and project managers that are tasked with justification. Their managers may deliver the justification to Senior Management, but it's often the data stewards who are required to collect, measure, and assert the "payoff" for the organization. Once the message is crafted, do not underestimate the need for and value of repeatedly advertising how the improved data will specifically benefit the organization. Give your organization the details as a component of an internal public or employee relations campaign. Success comes from continually reinforcing the benefits to the organization. This builds inertia, while hopefully managing realistic expectations. This inertia will see the project through budget planning when the project is compared against other competing projects.

"The first thing I noticed was the global visibility—NetSuite is certainly enabling the Senior Management team to have a consistent view of everything going on in our worldwide network," says Yeffa. "It allows us to think, act, and work as a single company worldwide." In the process, the company has cut an estimated $200,000 in annual IT and administrative costs as part of its requirements to run an accurate, sustainable business. And NetSuite has supported Cartridge World's 200 percent collective increase in sales to over 500 storefronts in the United States and more than 1,650 worldwide in 63 countries. Much of that is thanks to NetSuite's B2B e-commerce capabilities.

What you should do: Stay the course and remain focused on your business goals. Evangelize the business value of effective, comprehensive, enterprise-wide BI and analytics to all key constituencies at your organization, from Senior Management to sales and support teams. Strive to focus on solutions and vendors that support and encourage interoperability, ease of use and management, and effective integration. And keep at least one eye on technological and business developments among BI solution providers.

Miljoco then convened a team composed of Senior Management and representatives from every department that would be directly impacted by an ERP system: sales, manufacturing, engineering, production & logistics, finance. Over multiple meetings, the team created a list of features they wanted in an ERP system. The features were divided into "Must haves" and "Nice to haves." To qualify for the "must have" list, features either:

And interestingly...and so the focus, the driver, was profitability. The design of the system was focused on product profitability. But the most interesting factor of success was that...was the Senior Management support behind the project in that when the solution actually went live, all of the other solutions that people were using in the organization were shut down. And there was this management decree that you will use this information. Everybody will use it so we're all singing from the same page.

In late 2004, the Senior Management team of the Huntsman Corporation, a global manufacturer of chemical products, identified an opportunity to both prepare the company for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and achieve cost reductions. Learn how the company selected a new financials solution that helped it reduce audit fees, avoid headcount additions, improve productivity, and create an enterprise-wide analytics platform.

Cartridge World . "The first thing I noticed was the global visibility—NetSuite is certainly enabling the Senior Management team to have a consistent view of everything going on in our worldwide network," says Steven L. Yeffa, CFO. "It allows us to think, act, and work as a single company worldwide." In the process, the company has cut an estimated $200,000 in annual IT and administrative costs out of its requirements to run an accurate, sustainable business.

Once reserved for the upper echelons of Senior Management, succession planning is being redefined as a key component of board-level strategy. But if succession planning was easy, everyone would be doing it. The problem that exists today is that succession planning is barely automated, let alone optimized. This chief executive officer (CEO) guide provides five key tips for jump-starting your succession planning efforts.

Simulation can remedy one time and ongoing problems in the warehouse. Learn about the technology of computer stimulation and how it can benefit Senior Management in the logistics, distribution, and warehousing industries. This paper will describe the benefits of simulation as an analytical tool and the industrial lessons learned from failed simulation projects.

Rather than viewing the current environment as the age of overbearing government and regulation, founders, owners and Senior Management of private companies should recognize an opportunity to transform their business. Companies that develop the systems, processes and controls that enable them to manage their business growth on a day-to-day basis as well as foresee problems and initiate proactive decisions will have a huge advantage over their counterparts who are in a continually-reactive mode.

Many automotive companies are set in their ways and culturally not adept at change. Old-school hiring and separation techniques, antiquated systems and processes, and layers of management and bureaucracy remain the challenge. A corporate mind shift must take place-and it has to start with Senior Management. Company leaders must drive a new corporate mandate that forces their organization, for the irst time, to link human capital investments and employee performance to business strategy and objectives.

A traditional business case for self-service might only compute return on investment (ROI) , equal to the sum of the profit from an investment plus the change in the value of the investment, divided by the starting value of the investment. In doing so, it would neglect to account for the associated change in the customer equity resulting from the self-service experience, potentially leading to suboptimal managerial decisions in which more value is destroyed than created through self-service. ROC, in contrast, captures the total value created by customers and thereby allows Senior Management to build a more balanced business case by considering all of the economics.

St. Marys remains pleased with the maintenance system's continued support and the results that they have experienced. Senior Management has certainly embraced the system as the Mill Manager reviews all purchase requisitions on a daily basis to keep abreast of not only financial aspects of his operation, but also safety. “We have improved our safety record by 20% year over year. A lot of that can be attributed to the maintenance system.” Delvecchio says. By means of a safety work order they are able to discern which work is a priority and react accordingly. Without the organization the maintenance system provides, the slower reaction time to such critical issues could prove costly or even disastrous.

For example, a centralized accounting system will greatly improve analytic capabilities for both the accounting department and senior managers who need access to financial data. Only when financial management processes are consolidated, can Senior Management truly have strategic insight into their financial position. Plus, productivity and collaboration increase dramatically when employees are not relying on spreadsheets, documents and databases that are scattered across servers and desktops at the credit union. The key concept here is one of ‘transparency' which is the ability to quickly show anyone with the need to know that the organization is fiscally well run.

To realize the benefits of enterprise performance management (EPM), the focus needs to be on facilitating collaboration between Senior Management and business unit management. In practice, most organizations do not programmatically incorporate two-way communication into the planning process. Yet this is where many organizations find the greatest benefit in improving business performance—and the most difficulty in making the change.

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a business planning process owned by executives and Senior Management, with the key goal of creating realistic plans. However, one critical success factor that can easily get overlooked is that the “quality” of the entire S&OP process is only as good as the data and the detailed demand and supply plans that support it.

• Job title/function: The research sample included respondents with the following job titles: Senior Management or vice president (18%), director (14%), manager (40%), staff (10%), and internal consultant (18%)

The largest number of responses was for EMC Corp.'s Clariion, with 118 evaluations; HP EVA was second with 67. The most represented industry was financial services, followed by healthcare and government/nonprofit. The distribution of respondents by company size was weighted slightly toward large organizations. The breakdown here was 28.3% from small organizations (less than $100 million in revenue), 29.4% from midsized organizations ($100 million to $1 billion) and 42.3% from large organizations (more than $1 billion). The majority of respondents are in operational roles, with only 6% from Senior Management. Storage administrators comprise 24.9% of the respondents, and 16.8% are storage managers.

"The first thing I noticed was the global visibility " NetSuite is certainly enabling the Senior Management team to have a consistent view of everything going on in our worldwide network," says Steven L. Yeffa, CFO. "It allows us to think, act, and work as a single company worldwide." In the process, the company has cut an estimated $200,000 in annual IT and administrative costs out of its requirements to run an accurate, sustainable business. And NetSuite has supported Cartridge world's 200 percent collective increase in sales to its 500+ storefronts in the U.S. and more than 1,400 worldwide in 28 countries. Much of that is thanks to NetSuite's B2B ecommerce capabilities.

• Measure your network against the half-life and persistence curves. Beat the half-life curve by graphically tracking the percentage of vulnerabilities mitigated within each 30-day cycle and the number of vulnerabilities that extend past 180 days. Tracking total vulnerabilities is also useful, but be sure to account for the rate of announced vulnerabilities from the vendors (a climbing rate of exposed vulnerabilities may be a function of vendor quality announcements and not a function of an inferior patching process). Evaluate process changes against these metrics to measure best practices.
• Measure team performance by the half-life results and the treatment of the persistence law. Chart the performance of each security team by asset category, with comments in performance reviews based on competition with peers for protecting the business processing environment. The goal of a security team is to reduce risks, particularly to critical assets. Therefore, place such security metrics into the human resources performance review process and make people accountable once they have the proper tools in place to quickly and accurately audit the network on an ongoing basis.
• Use gathered metrics to communicate the security problem to Senior Management. Lines of business managers can understand the trend of vulnerabilities and the efforts of the security team to minimize the risk to the enterprise. Use actual performance measurements to educate your executive management team and show the value of security best practices in maintaining business continuity, reducing risks and maintaining a secure infrastructure.

If you're not up to speed on the key benefits of software asset management (SAM) solutions, this overview can help. Additionally, you'll learn about the areas where an SAM solution can deliver the most tangible, quantifiable cost savings to your company. You'll also learn how to calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) on an SAM solution in order to present Senior Management with a compelling business case.

Complicated by potential variations that can affect sales (weather, competitive activity, etc.), the results can be difficult to understand. Frequent updates also enable sales representatives to address supply chain discrepancies in a more timely and effective manner. If a store or region's inventory is particularly low on an item, the situation can be addressed immediately before the inventory is exhausted. Finally, for Senior Management, frequent updates enable a whole new look at the overall operations and profitability of the company, from the warehouse to the retail shelf.

"Our first dashboard was designed for Senior Management, and had high level reporting. But rapidly, we've allowed them to customize their dashboard to have data that was most relevant to them, all based on a common back-end. Then we gave a number of middle managers access to the same data, but they are not power users, so we have to make it simpler for them, and deliver the right data. A manager might want to know how many beds are occupied and for how long, while a doctor wants to know how many patients are waiting for a consultation. Same goes for analysts in production, statistics and clientele groups."

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems now support many organizations' most important business processes, and house their most sensitive corporate data. As a result, Senior Management needs to fully understand both the timing and project plan before proceeding with any ERP upgrade. Learn how to plan and manage your next ERP upgrade project, and develop an overall corporate strategy for maintaining your ERP system.

Today, food manufacturers face significant challenges. Increasing costs, government regulation, safety concerns, and constantly changing consumer tastes are a way of life. Senior Management must know about these food industry issues; why an integrated business software system is essential for controlling costs, managing inventory, and meeting regulations; and the key functionality to look for in new business software.

Implementing an effective operational excellence strategy requires strong Senior Management support combined with the right resources and tools at every level. Few companies claim to have achieved complete success. Real-time end-to-end visibility across the value chain is widely seen as the ultimate goal. Yet most respondents say this goal remains elusive.