Blog

I'll start this blog with a question. How does Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and all of the various Kaizen events support strategic investments?  We’re building machinery that is more intelligent.  Manufacturing is entering the age of Industry 4.0 with the digitization of manufacturing.  It’s about time.  We have a lot…

In my last blog we discussed two steps that companies can take to align their organization to be more responsive to the changing business world and more focused on profits.  The steps that were discussed, “Develop a clear change objective” and “Develop an Organizational Change Management Air Traffic Control Tower” are essential in any change initiative.  The next steps are essential when…

This blog is the third post in a series on management accounting information for effective decision support. The first blog highlighted why financial accounting information simply cannot cut it when it comes to effective decision support. The second blog pointed out the problems created by method-centric approaches to costing. By method-centric I mean ways of parsing general ledger information into more supposedly relevant buckets of information for decision support. Fortunately these methods often contradicted each other as to the appropriate management action in a particular scenario. I say fortunately because the contradictions forced us to keep looking. And as I alluded to in the last post, help came from an unexpected place—philosophy.

Surviving in today’s market is challenging.  The good news is that companies today have access to more real-time information than ever before.  Integrated manufacturing equipment, smart devices, CRM systems, ERP systems, MES systems, website analytics and a host of other “big data” technologies give executives instantaneous access to real-time data.  In today’s environment, the need for executives…

In Part 1 and Part  2 of this blog we dispelled the banker’s old Rule of Thumb that the more financial products (accounts) owned by a customer the more profitable is that customer.  One take-away from rejecting this Rule of Thumb is that sales campaigns…

Investors and shareholders that read in the introduction to this blog post that 68% of managers acknowledge their management accounting information is deficient will very likely respond with: Whaaaaaaat?  To which the management accountants among us would say: Exactly!  And, quite frankly, the situation is worse than what it seems at first.  In the 2003 E&Y study 83% of managers responded that they…

Recently several articles were published about President Donald Trump challenging the “One China” principle that has been the bedrock for past US-China relations.   Many say that President Donald Trump is just posturing in anticipation of future US-China trade negotiations…

The customer profitability management system at one mid-sized credit union provided a look at the Banking Industry’s Rule of Thumb that the more financial products (accounts) owned by a customer the more profitable is that customer.  See Alta Via’s blog Banking Industry Myths, Part 1.

In the prior blog, we showed that…

Banking Industry Myths, Part 1

 Over the years practitioners in the Banking industry have developed Rules of Thumb to guide their everyday decisions.  These Rules of Thumb were based on general observations, anecdotal evidence, and high-level averaged financial…

The Frustration and Divide Between the Shop Floor and Finance

There is a far more intractable problem with the information finance produces: it leads to incorrect (i.e., suboptimal) operational decisions. Even if the information finance provides was available in real-time to decision makers on the shop floor, the disconnect…