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A co-worker called me the other day with a conundrum. The Excel VLOOKUP function was the perfect tool to solve his problem, but he had two columns to match not one column, as required…

In this series we have looked at a principle-based approach that takes the uncertainty out of decisions on how to best do managerial costing, which also eliminates the smoke and mirrors of the various managerial costing methods (e.g., standard costing, activity-based costing). Causality (the relationship between a cause and its effect) has been established as the principle that governs managerial cost modeling. In this post we take a closer look at the second principle—analogy, which governs how managerial cost information should be used.

Upon their return from sunny Florida, I interviewed 'John Jackiw' and 'Jeffery Klabish' to get their opinions on where manufacturing is going and how Siemens and the rest of the attendees are viewing the future at PLMConnect. Some of the major topics include digitization of manufacturing as well as the shift in focus to empowering the customer and consumer in consulting space.

I find Excel text functions extremely helpful in manipulating presented data into a format I can use. For example, cost centers are often numerical characters of a specified length with preceding 0’s. So, if you are faced with a column of cost centers that are formatted as numbers, and you need to make them all 3 characters long with preceding 0’s, you would use the RIGHT and CONCATENATE commands to make quick work of this issue.

Step 5 – Measure Progress and keep measuring it: Too often, initiatives are tracked with objective metrics such as “number of employees trained”.  These metrics do not measure the emotional buy-in of the organization and do not ensure improvements are maintained after the initial change event occurs and…

In the first four parts of this series we showed that two popular banker’s Rules of Thumb are myths that will misinform and mislead management’s decision making. We tested these Rules of Thumb using data from the sophisticated customer profitability management system this author installed at one mid-sized Credit Union, which used advanced ABC costing techniques and monthly transactions by customer.

Alta Via Consulting is excited to announce a new technology partnership with SedApta , where Sales and Operations (S&OP) are optimized to profit.

Last week during our Webcast we were not consulting a crystal ball when predicting the continued weakness of the U.S. economy. However, we did ask the question “Are you ready?” regardless of which way the trend is going. With the recent news from Industry Week (http://goo.gl/dRFrQM) that the recession is already here for four states, that theoretical scenario became an unfortunate reality. I’m hoping…