You no doubt recognise the importance of loving your customers and you probably look after your staff, but what about your suppliers? Do you consider your supplier to be a partner and why does the relationship with external providers matter?

The increasing reliance on external service provision means that the bond you establish with your supplier is paramount. The modern business is a multi-sourcer that buys technology and services on-demand to fulfil a fast-changing series of business requirements. Under such circumstances, the IT manager has to work with providers which they know they can trust.

Real success, however, comes from a partnership approach in which technology chiefs use trusted suppliers they can work closely with to deliver ongoing innovation.

Take consumer giant Procter & Gamble (P&G), for example, which has created a global business services division that looks to consolidate and then outsource non-core IT activities. The approach relies on strategic partnerships with key service providers and it is an approach that has cut costs and increased innovation.

The P&G approach has been honed over a number of years and the sheer size of the organisation means that it can benefit from economies of scale. But just because an organisation is large, it does not mean that lessons cannot be leant by smaller firms.

Treat a supplier simply as a source of software and you will undoubtedly come unstuck. Every deal matters and value comes from working with a solid and reliable supplier that understands your business and your challenges. And remember that innovative solutions to such challenges do not have to rely on new, expensive technology. Innovation could mean using existing IT resources in a smarter and more effective manner.

Finally, always remember to communicate your concerns. Work with colleagues, peers and suppliers to identify where improvements can be made.

So, why hold your suppliers at arms length when they can be your partners? You will always reap the rewards of a balanced partner relationship in which both customer and supplier are on a similar footing.

Further reading: 

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/From_internal_service_provider_to_strategic_partner_An_interview_with_the_head_of_Global_Business_Se

Is your IT supplier a partner? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

There is little point investing in internal staff if you are going to cut workers at the earliest sign of a downturn. Training and employing staff is a costly process and it is surely remiss to write off such investment.

Before getting to the point of redundancies, your organisation needs to have a strategy to ensure workers are committed, productive and ambitious. Start by thinking about what type of company you would most like to work for.

If your business is only as good as your people, how can you ensure existing staff are capable of being future executives – and how can you attract the up-and-coming generation?

Concentrate on what types of things would improve the status of your organisation and make people more likely to consider a position in your firm as the right opportunity. That question is only likely to become increasingly important.

Leave nothing to chance. First, select recruitment tools that can help you identify the individual that is likely to be the best fit for your organisation. Weighted matching will ensure the right candidate is offered the right opportunity.

Then look for software that can help you create the right development projects for your new and retained staff. Trained workers feel wanted; prove your commitment through well-managed work experience, workshops and mentoring.

On an ongoing basis, use specialist analytics software to ensure worker performance is valued, rather than just monitored. The right metrics will show how staff are aligned with the broader goals of performance, ensuring people costs are not wasted and promotion is more likely.

Finally, make sure the obvious details – payment terms, absenteeism levels and succession planning – are not ignored. Workers will quickly feel aggrieved if they believe their efforts are being ignored at the expense of other less productive employees.

An integrated approach to human resources software can help with all these elements. Your business is only as good as your people and the right technology will attract employees and keep retained staff keen.

Next generation leadership is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

When money is tight, discretional spend takes a back seat. Rather than splash their cash on marketing or innovation programmes, businesses are keen to concentrate on operational expenditure.

It’s often a smart strategy. The reason most firms fold during a downturn is due to cash flow concerns. Cutting back on the nice-to-haves means the organisation will survive and be able to grow in the long-term.

But for every smart strategy there is a considerably less beguiling downside. After all, how do you go about identifying which areas can receive cuts? And how can you be sure the cuts won’t have a detrimental affect?

Training is often considered to be one area that businesses can cut. Rather than being viewed as a means of up-skilling the workforce, additional schooling is often seen as unwarranted extra.

But without top notch training, expensive human resources and IT assets will be under-used and ineffective. Such risks mean you must prioritise training and ensure you deliver a high level of skills to your project team.

Some firms are of the belief than training staff simply provides skills that will be taken out of the business when an employee leaves. That is a misguided approach.

Workers are likely to take a great deal of knowledge when they leave, but your organisation would be well-advised to ensure staff are as informed as possible while employed.

Extra training will keep workers in tip top form. What is more, employees like a challenge. Keep workers trained and they are less likely to leave – and then the additional knowledge will stay in-house anyway.

Give your staff tailored and user-focused training to make the most of your IT systems and they will deliver benefits for the business; benefits that will more than payback the outlay in education.

So is training a really discretional spend? It is time to educate your executive team that such thinking is pure folly.

Training of end users must be a business priority is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

However, now is not the time for complacency; positive signs are no excuse for a lack of attention to detail. Businesses that take time to heave a huge sigh of relief will see fast-moving rivals quickly pass their organisation.

Now, then, is the time to learn from our experiences and to turn lessons into action. More than ever before, the recession has pushed attention on to leading executives, who are expected to closely monitor spending and produce a quick return on investment (ROI).

The focus on value will prove invaluable during the recovery, where a tight focus on operational expenditure will help create more funds for innovation. Many IT leaders will have spent the last 12 months avoiding new IT spending – that is now simply not an option.

Sweated assets will need refreshing and smart technology chiefs will find ways to make the best of innovative systems. Creating a strategy that proves a quick ROI will show that lessons learnt from the recession have been heeded.

Corporate performance management (CPM), encompassing business intelligence (BI) systems, should be at the top of your agenda, providing a combination of analysis, planning and reporting.

BI software will help you to measure key performance indicators that will prove the true value of IT initiatives. It will also enable company-wide reports on the achievements and status of specific projects, departments and product lines, for example.

Like all innovations, business intelligence needs to demonstrate value. Success is not a given – research from analyst IDC shows that while 53% of users believe investment in BI has delivered an ROI, as much as 32% are unsure and 15% suggest it has not.

Make sure you select the right tools and partners to help you prove the business benefits of BI as well as IT in general. Get innovation right and the business will see that good things can indeed emerge from a recession.

Now is the time to invest in innovation that demonstrates a clear ROI is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

Sales are down, the UK economy is in debt and unemployment is rising. In hard times, how far would a depressed employee go? Would one of your workers commit fraud?

Research from the UK’s fraud prevention service CIFAS suggests an economic slowdown and a rise in fraud certainly go hand in hand, with a 40% increase in people being falsely impersonated last year compared with 2008.

Worse for the business, half of the 2,000-plus employees surveyed by consultant Ernst & Young in 2009 thought that one or more types of unethical business behaviour was acceptable during a recession!

The implications for your business are clear: when the economy is in turmoil, the risk of employees committing fraud is likely to increase. You and your executive colleagues must take steps to protect the firm against potential exposure.

Your first priority should be implementing technology that can help combat errant behaviour. And specific software systems, such as spend analysis and document management, are key to fraud detection and prevention.

Companies looking to understand the direction of cash must understand who is being paid and when. Analytics will help you identify which employee is acting in an unusual manner.

Accidental errors – such as billing mistakes and invoice miscalculations – can be seen. And taking a strong stance on spend management will also allow you to track and trace potential weak spots that could provide a loophole for fraudsters.

Document management is also key for fraud prevention. Electronic capture of documents will mean the business will be able to preserve the integrity of its evidence and documents cannot get altered, shredded or mysteriously ‘lost’.

Invoices, orders and other financial documents can be imaged, securely stored and all interactions with the imaged documents are recorded which creates an audit trail, meaning the opportunity for an errant employee to cover their activity is significantly reduced.

The economy may well be improving but times remain hard for many, making employee fraud a real risk. Finding the right technologies for fraud detection and prevention are therefore vital, from spend analysis and document management systems through to expense management and time and attendance solutions. The time to act is now.

Fraud detection and prevention – why software is key is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

XBRL, (Extensible Business Reporting Language), a ‘language for the electronic communication of business and financial data’, is being developed by the non-profit organisation XBRL International, to improve the standard of financial reporting for investors, analysts and journalists).

In May 2008, the SEC stated that the largest US organisations should be filing their main reports via XBRL and that other listed US organisations should be filing via XBRL within 3 years. This was followed up by the statement in September 2008 that the SEC is potentially looking to move to IFRS by 2014.

These are two of the clearest signs yet that there may soon be one single global taxonomy (IFRS) and that all US listed organisations will be required to file their reports via XBRL, potentially by IFRS

This will increase the global drive for the adoption of XBRL, following up local initiatives in Australia, Belgium, Japan, France, Norway and here in the UK. We have already been able to submit accounts to Companies House and Corporation Tax comps to HMRC – but this has yet to go mainstream in the UK.

These recent moves from the SEC may rekindle interest in the benefits that XBRL has for the reporting and consumption of financial and business data.  We continue to watch with interest

XBRL – a way to go? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

A lot of implementations that I see, and the discussions that I have with practitioners who have implemented them, seem to offer little to the business and display only a passing acquaintance with anything that could remotely be termed as intelligence.

Why is this? Organisations, like people, are deeply flawed. They are prone to behaviours that in the short term seem to offer solutions but in the long term deliver little.

Who is to blame? Well many people would blame suppliers. Just as we often do in our private lives when we see that we drink and eat too much and exercise too little. If only there weren’t so many adverts on TV pushing unhealthy foods and so many of those tempting ‘buy one get one free offers’ in the stores with their easy access and parking then I would be that slim Adonis, that is struggling to get out of this current wreck of a body. Suppliers are as ready in the corporate IT world to pander to our organisation’s weaknesses as they are in our private lives to our own weaknesses.

Middle Age writers looked at Man and saw what a weak vessel he was and came up with the Seven Deadly Sins of pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony and drunkenness, anger and sloth. I have looked at modern businesses and have likewise come up with the Seven Deadly Sins of Business Intelligence. Just to avoid the charge of pride, I realise that they don’t quite have the grandeur of Saint Thomas Acquinas’s Summa Theologica, and I don’t expect to see an upsurge of Morality Plays based on them. On the other hand, I do expect to see projects that work and which deliver the real value to every organisation.

The Seven Sins are:

1. Being unprepared.
2. Lacking direction.
3. Unsuitability of those doing the job.
4. Wrong culture.
5. Technology fixated.
6. Underestimation.
7. Unthinking.

And of all of these Technology Fixation is the most prevalent. I get to read lots of invitation to tenders and visit prospective clients who have invested an enormous amount of time and effort in coming up with what the technology needs to be able to do. There is often a direct correlation to the lack of thinking that has been done with what they will actually do with these products when they get them. To be clear these projects rarely fail because of technology.

There is a lot of wishful thinking that goes on. Think about exercise bikes and home gyms. We know we are too fat and unhealthy. We would like to be like the photos of those lithe athletes. They are peddling the exercise bike and using the home gym. If only we had that exercise bike and home gym we too could look just like that. Which is correct other than the fact that we are lazy couch potatoes who will not take an hour out of our day to actually do something, unlike the beaming models that so obviously do.

Business Intelligence is no different. Business Intelligence tools work well and have been used to great effect by lean and fit organisations, those that have a sense of purpose and vision, that have a culture of analysing problems and doing something about them and that are prepared to invest, not just the money, but, so much more importantly, the time and effort required.

So many other organisations are in the position of the 9 stone weakling, who having sent off to Charles Atlas, the body builder, for his famous exercise regime, was forced to write in:

‘Yesterday, I received the Dynamic Tension programme in the post. Could you now please send the muscles?’

Business Intelligence should be about the transformation of the organisation. There is a technology aspect to this but don’t be fooled that it is as easy as buying a product. Look at your organisation and think about the hard work that needs to go into turning it into one that can use Business Intelligence to improve and compete.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Business Intelligence is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment