- Thoughts on Planning: How do you know if your planning is good”?” (12/5/2016) - Way more than in operational processes, corporate planning is very hard to evaluate. What tells you that your planning is "good"? What does "good" even mean? And is that worth the money your company spends on it? A new study in cooperation with a German university provides answers. Cycle times, processing costs, scrap rates: In operational processes we have plenty of ways to measure a business process and to judge its efficiency. These measures, if performed repeatedly, are the basis for improvement and optimization. Administrative processes like corporate planning are much harder to evaluate. How can the quality of planning be measured? How much does budgeting cost? And what value does… Read More
- Thoughts on Planning: Do you really think that adding detail will improve accuracy? (11/19/2016) - Planning always means handling uncertainty. Organizations want to avoid uncertainty as good as possible, and they use planning as a means to achieve that. A frequent misunderstanding in doing so is that a more detailed planning automatically means a more accurate planning. The opposite can be the case. There's an old but still very true rule on the granularity of planning: “Planning without control is useless, control without planning is impossible” Wild: Grundlagen der Unternehmensplanung (1981), S. 44. It is meaningless to plan things that will not be used for later control. At the same time, if we want to control something, we… Read More
- Thoughts on Planning: Are you planning already or are you still playing budget poker? (11/3/2016) - Budgeting and Target-Setting have become a tradition in many companies, even though they can cause quite obvious negative side effects. Provocatively speaking, classical budgeting processes not only are very time-consuming and costly. They regularly force people to cheat. A good friend approached me a few weeks ago, she was a bit weary. She is working as a sales coordinator for a company which is currently facing difficult market conditions. Her team was very frustrated, because they were about to miss their yearly bonuses even though it had been looking good almost through the whole year. Their numbers were now close to target, but not close… Read More
- Stampa at the SNP Transformation Days 2016 (11/2/2016) - With around 50 speakers from major international companies like Siemens, ThyssenKrupp, T-Systems, Bosch Rexroth or SAP, the Transformation World 2016 focused on digital business transformation. Stampa Partners lead the discussion on the impact of HANA on Business Intelligence Architectures. This year's Transformation World conference, hosted by SNP AG, took place in the German city of Heidelberg on 21st and 22nd October. More then 50 speakers, mainly from major international SAP customers as well as from a few chosen solution providers and SAP presented their experiences with the transformation of business processes into the SAP Digital Core on the new HANA platform. Presentations and discussions were held on a very profound level.… Read More