Is Your Management Information Future Ready?
How would you know if you are asked the question?
This post outlines the questions to ask to give you a picture of future readiness
Is your management Information able to grow with your business?
As you grow, Is it getting harder to answer the business questions you have?
Does your reporting feel disjointed and not future ready?
Imagine how much easier it would be if you could grow parts of your
business and the data just flowed in and fit into your existing structures
The information you need to see for that new store, product or division
readily available and feeding into your existing reports
By having a clear structure for your streams of business data to flow into
you create consistency, control and order
Without a scalable structure you will eventually be held back
Not able to confidently grow for fear of the information net being able to keep up, or your teams stretched just trying to keep up
Add Scalability to your Management Information
Ideally you need to add scalable structure to your business data .As your add more elements to your business, you need to be able to
add these as layers
Hierarchies are an excellent way to build in roll ups or subtotals to give meaningful depth
Examples of Hierarchies
Products – Including department, sub departments, categories, sub categories, brands, seasonality and much more
Locations – geographies, divisions, areas, types of locations, sizes, features
Dates – financial periods, months, week numbers, years, quarters
Currencies – Local, Reporting, Group Level
In a large retailer, my team created a highly scalable architecture
1000 stores, 10,000 product categories, all planned and cohesive and well structured
Did it require a lot of effort to set up – yes
Did it add value once it was created – the creation enabled a vast range of business improvements, from strategic planning, tactical operations and procurement improvements, it delivered huge improvements
If you don’t have all of these structures created and widely used in the business, you will inevitably
suffer from miscommunication, confusion, compatibility issues between teams
Without it you have an unquantifiable disadvantage
Questions to ask
People
Do acquisitions cause major delays in reporting?
Do people have to consolidate data from multiple different sources to create reports?
Does everyone use consistent language to describe products, places, businesses?
Processes
Do you have embedded disciplines for structure?
Is it easy to extend the structure to add new business streams or acquisitions?
Does growth or integration have an onboarding process?
Summary of how to get there
Start off with the simplest pieces of structure and centralise the master data
Ensure that everyone uses the same master data
Add complexity later once you begin to see the benefits
does it require technology?
Yes – but the most important piece is to establish the disciplines, technology can help, But the disciplines can get you a long way
You probably already have suitable technology in place, but do you have the people to police it?
Ask us about our health check
Management Information Health check
If you think your management information could be better get in touch and lets find ways to make you future ready and able to grow
Timeliness, Accuracy, People, Processes, Technology, and much more
