Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Data, Data Visualization, Latest News — No Comments ↓

The transition from traditional Business Intelligence to modern Data Visualization is happening at more companies every year as they seek to make decisions based on data instead of instinct. Gone are the days when IT writes reports for the business using technical resources in niche Business Intelligence applications.

The transition from traditional Business Intelligence to modern Data Visualization is happening at more companies every year as they seek to make decisions based on data instead of instinct. Gone are the days when IT writes reports for the business using technical resources in niche Business Intelligence applications.

Instead, we now see a collaborative environment where both IT and the business do what they do best. IT returns to managing the access and governing the data sources. At the same time, the business takes ownership of the data and of the analysis to get the best insights from the data collected.

There are three essential components of any modern Business Intelligence program:

  • Data Management
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Sharing

Data Management

One of your IT department’s core competencies is managing the data in your business systems. There are two parts to this, access control and governance.
Access is the simpler of these two items to manage. Much like how access to applications is granted within organizations. Similarly, access to the data should also be enabled. IT has a long history of understanding who should or should not have access to applications and data and can be trusted with this responsibility.


Governance is much more complicated. The core of this is that to make good decisions using data; you must have good data. Your data needs to be consistent, accurate, and complete. How you get there is a much longer conversation, but in a nutshell, it is cleansing, profiling, and monitoring for anomalies within a data warehouse or database.

Data Analysis

In this new world of Data Visualization, the business has taken responsibility for analyzing and presenting the data in the manner they find most effective. Traditionally IT would be required to help build reports and dashboards for their customers but didn’t truly understand the data they were working with. This caused delays and frustration for the business as often, the information required to make a good business decision would arrive after the decision needed to be made. Now with the business being hands-on and able to analyze the data on-demand, the information is now available to help support decisions made at speed the business needs.

Data Sharing

Sharing is where the real revolution has happened in Business Intelligence. In the past, the information provided to decision-makers has been in the form of static reports, generally in typical row and column format. With this new generation of data visualization tools, decisions are now being made using shared information in visually pleasing and intuitive formats that also allow the user to ask questions about the dynamic data by drilling down and shaping the data as they like.

Data consumers are no longer restricted to their office computers to see their dashboards and reports. They can also receive this data through their mobile devices, giving them the information they need at their fingertips. What this leads to is a culture where more people are asking questions about their data and identifying a greater volume of unexpected opportunities not possible with conventional tools. By transitioning to a modern Data Visualization platform, you create a collaborative environment where IT and your business organization can work together to provide your decision-makers with the information they need when they need it.

This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.

Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Data, Data Visualization, Database, Latest News — No Comments ↓

In our previous post in the Business Intelligence (BI) series, we looked at the basic definitions, features, and advantages of BI in general. In this article, we look at the Tableau BI tool, in particular, and discuss its pros and cons.

Pros

  • Excellent user interface: Tableau customers report among the highest scores in terms of breadth and ease of use, along with high business benefits realized. Tableau is the leader in BI tools regarding user interfaces and is recognized as the gold standard for its visual-based data discovery. Gartner’s “Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence and Analytics Software” report ranked it as the fastest-growing business intelligence and software vendor of 2013, noting the year’s growth rate of more than 80 percent!
  • Integration: Tableau integrates well with third-party big data platforms, including Hadoop. Tableau also supports Google BigQuery API– a plus for organizations that want highly detailed analytics.  Tableau provides an extensive roster of native data connections allowing easy integration with data from many sources.
  • Mobile Support: The excellent user interface is carried further onto mobile devices. and dashboard reports are automatically mobile-optimized. Compared to other vendors, BI users show the most adoption of mobile features, primarily due to the easy adaptability of the mobile user interface.
  • User Forums and Customer Service: Tableau has a very active user and developer community where queries are answered quickly. Tableau also receives excellent reviews in customer service. As per the Gartner report, despite Tableau’s exceptional growth, it has continued to deliver stellar customer experience and business value.  The fact that they have maintained that level of service points to their level of commitment to the customer.
  • Low cost: Compared to its big data counterparts, such as Business Objects and Qlik, Tableau is a comparatively low-cost solution.  Having a SaaS option allows organizations to choose a lower initial cost ownership model as well as to be able to scale licensing quickly and easily.
  • Easy to upgrade: 9 out of 10 Tableau customers are using the latest release of the software, which hints at the fact that the upgrades are easy to be carried out.

Cons

  • Initial Data Preparation:  Companies need to have strong technical skills to build the initial structure.  This is typically done by IT or a consulting organization.   Once the integration with the data source is done, though users with no or very little SQL knowledge can also access the tool to create the dashboards and analyze data.
  • Features: Some argue that not all statistical features are provided by Tableau. Business–centric solutions such as Tableau are used broadly throughout the organization, though they do have a narrower set of capabilities.
  • Financial Reporting:  Although great for analytical purposes, Tableau and other BI tools cannot replace Financial Reporting applications.   This does require the financial analyst to be proficient in several reporting tools and to use them interchangeably.

As per the Gartner report, customers place a high value on ease of use, satisfaction with product features, sales experience, support, product quality, upgrade experience, user enablement, achievement of business benefits, and supporting a range of analysis for all users. Tableau is gaining momentum because it excels in delivering in all these areas.

Source:

https://www.gartner.com/doc/2723017/market-share-analysis-business-intelligence
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2ACLP1P&ct=150220&st=sb
 
Straight Talk: Review of Tableau Software, the Pros and Cons
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.

Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Achievement, Latest News — No Comments ↓

Santa Clara County, an AST customer, has been selected as a finalist for IDC’s 2020 Smart Cities North America Awards in the Urban Planning and Land Use Category for its Assessment Appeals solution. Let’s support Santa Clara County by voting for this project in the “IDC Smart Cities Award” race.  
Voting ends February 26th, 2020!
Click here to vote!

IDC, a premier global market intelligence firm, chose the Assessment Appeals project at Santa Clara County as a finalist among several hundred entries across the country in the IDC Smart Cities Awards for Urban Planning and Land Use.  We can now help them win the distinction!

Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Finance, Latest News — No Comments ↓

Every organization has a finance team, but not every CFO has a change agent on the team dedicated to transforming finance. It takes a special kind of finance professional to leverage the cloud and other emerging technologies to modernize finance. 

Oracle celebrates these unsung heroes of finance with the Oracle Change Agents of Finance Awards. These global awards recognize those with the vision to see the potential of Tomorrow’s Finance, Today. Nominations are open to any individual or finance team using Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud or Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud deployed alone or in conjunction with other Oracle Cloud applications. 

Voting for the Oracle Change Agents of Finance Awards is now open until February 21st. Cast your vote now! 

Award winners will receive a complimentary pass to attend Modern Finance Experience at Modern Business Experience, March 23-26, 2020 in Chicago. Join us as we celebrate the best of Tomorrow’s Finance, Today. 

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Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Conference, Customer Relationship Management, Latest News — No Comments ↓

On January 15 Mike Mullane, an Applications Systems Administration Manager at H&P, visited AST to attend an Architecture Review Board meeting. The ARB team is a multi-disciplinary team with top Architects from various areas such as Enterprise Integration, Web Architecture, Security, and Content Management. The purpose of the ARB review meeting was to validate the design for H&P’s project. Team members presented high-level requirements and key design elements to the team.

The design review validated base practices and covered both intended and unintended consequences of the chosen design. The team approach brings a wide breadth of experience and deep technical expertise with the individual technology components and areas of specialization for each Architect.

The ARB Meeting was a very successful and engaging collaboration. It was also the longest ARB session at 3 hours 45 mins! Afterwards, the group celebrated by enjoying dinner together at Cooper’s Hawk.

“I had the opportunity to attend AST’s Lisle, IL offices for an Architecture Review Board (ARB) in early January of this year. AST is our chosen implementer to design and create a solution to automate the provisioning of users to Oracle Cloud services.

The purpose of my visit was to join the AST team for the first review of the design of the solution. AST coordinated the ARB meeting with a dozen AST employees present in the conference room and no less then three other team members on the phone. We had the usual round the table introductions followed by the facilitator announcing to the group that our job was to ask questions. And we were reminded that all questions and considerations should be voiced.

I was first impress that all involved took this seriously and asked challenging questions of one another, the security architects, and of me, the customer. The meeting originally scheduled for an hour and 45 minutes went for over 3 hours. Through this discussion, I believe that the result was a much better design. And several questions that needed to be followed up on.

I felt that traveling to the AST office for the ARB was well worth the investment of my time and my companies resources to send me. I had the opportunity to meet the team that would be working on our project, see the initial design and to provide my feedback and help shape the outcome.

The biggest surprise for me was to witness a healthy company culture that really promotes teamwork. Through this teamwork, I believe the solution AST build’s for us will be the best solution available.” – Mike Mullane, Applications Systems Administration Manager at Helmerich & Payne, Inc.

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Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Accounts Payable, Finance — No Comments ↓

For many in the finance department, the phrase “financial period close” brings with it visions of long days filled with time-consuming, cumbersome, and stressful processes. Yet, despite the time devoted to it, this record-to-report process of accounts reconciliation, journal entries, and financial reporting is essential for providing accurate information on business performance and ensuring compliance.

It doesn’t have to be so painful, however. Indeed, every CFO dreams of a faster close. Recent research shows why. In APQC’s General Accounting Open Standards Benchmarking survey, the bottom 25 percent of the 2,300 respondents said they need 10 or more calendar days to complete the monthly period close – the days between running the trial balance to completing the consolidated financial statements. In contrast, the top 25 percent of performers complete the monthly close in 4.8 days or less.

A faster period close process has two significant benefits. It gives executives in the business timelier access to the latest data available, enabling them to make quicker and better-informed decisions. For the CFO and finance team, less time spent on closing the books means more time providing the analysis and insight that the business needs to make key decisions. They can provide input into scaling operations up or down in response to cash flow demands or changing market conditions or how to reallocate resources to jump on an emerging opportunity.

At the same time, however, there is no room to sacrifice accuracy for speed. There are ways to have both. Smart finance teams are now employing ‘continuous accounting.’ Continuous accounting distributes the finance team’s workload evenly over an accounting period. If tasks normally associated with period close – such as reconciliations – are embedded in day-to-day activities throughout the month or quarter, there’s no last-minute demand for extra work as period end approaches, speeding up the process of closing the books.

The impact of continuous accounting can be felt beyond just faster close periods and relief for the finance team. Done right, continuous accounting can also improve real-time reporting and keep the finance function in step with the wider business, more closely attuned to the rise and fall of the organization. The link between opportunities and challenges and their financial impacts are more immediately visible to all, enabling better-informed decisions.

However, there is a significant barrier to continuous accounting for many organizations: a hairball of incompatible finance and IT systems and unconnected spreadsheets.

To truly embrace continuous accounting, organizations need a modern cloud-based finance and ERP system, such as NetSuite, that delivers data integrity and consistency, standard processes, and automation. A unified ERP system with all departments working on the same source of data with access to the same general ledger provides a common chart of accounts and a single version of data on inventory, payroll, sales orders, and customers.

With a common data source, organizations can automate many of the previously manual tasks, such as journal entries, account reconciliations, variance analysis, and intercompany transactions. With the cloud, those can be executed automatically.

What’s more, with the entire finance team united through the cloud, no matter where they are, it’s easier to delegate financial close responsibilities. For example, if a typical financial close takes five days and requires 25 processes, the CFO can assign five tasks per day to the global finance team. On day two, with all those tasks in the system, the CFO can see a report on what tasks from the prior day are not yet complete and address them. Gone are the days when managers and staff are giving CFO the answers they think he or she wants to hear. Moreover, the CFO knows who’s on target and where and how. In a cloud-based system, the CFO never has to ask the question, and they always get a straight answer.

The CFO also has the ability to run KPIs on the close process of identifying which individuals or locations are not completing their tasks on time and reallocating resources appropriately.

A faster – and smarter – period close can deliver considerable value to the organization, giving more relevant management information earlier and freeing up a lot of valuable time for the finance team and CFO to contribute more strategically to the business.

This post was originally published by CTR.  CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023. 

Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Cloud, Cloud ERP, Cloud Migration, Cloud Solutions, Latest News, Managed Services, Oracle — No Comments ↓

Over the past decade, many companies have made the decision to move their operations to the cloud. There are many reasons for doing this: It can reduce your operational costs, make your workforce more flexible and your services more scalable, secure your data, improve collaboration amongst your employees, and—most importantly—help you better connect with your customers. 

Even if you’ve made a sizable investment in Oracle ERP Cloud applications, however, there is no guarantee that you’re going to get everything that you could be getting out of it. One of the most popular cloud options to maximize your investment is to employ an Application Managed Services provider who is an Oracle Platinum Partner. 

Here are 6 ways that using an Application Managed Services Provider (AMSP) can help you get the most out of your cloud investment:

1. Performing a System Assessment of Your Current State and Future Potentials

Just because you’ve moved to Oracle, it doesn’t mean that you no longer have to perform routine administrative activities like system assessments. Sadly, many companies tend to do just that—they neglect these important evaluations. In doing so, they’re setting themselves up for having a system that is not optimized for their business and its capabilities. 

By working with an Oracle AMSP like us, you’ll have a team that is dedicated to improving and/or safeguarding the investment you’ve made and ensuring that you’re using the power of Oracle to your advantage. Furthermore, we will determine whether or not your company’s system speed is robust enough for your needs. Many companies shy away from doing this because it can be a long and tedious process. With a managed services partner, however, you get to outsource that hassle. Better yet, your company will be set up with a system that is optimized and fast enough not only for your current situation, but for where you plan to be down the road. So, you can scale your cloud computing capabilities while also growing your business. 

2. Routine Environmental Health Checks

In addition to the system assessments, AMSPs can help your company set up custom reports and monitor them in order to make sure they’re running smoothly. We understand that no two companies are alike and each has its own infrastructure onto which the Oracle environment is placed, so these checks ensure that you’re able to operate as efficiently as possible. Moreover, by looking at the tables your team has accessed and the way you’ve extracted data, we can even increase your system speed. 

3. Have Quarterly Update Reviews

Oracle releases quarterly patches, so we review their readiness documents to figure out if these updates are going to have an effect on your system’s performance. Furthermore, we’ll take a look at any enhancements Oracle has made to see if we can optimize your system. If there are any updates or system enhancements we believe you need to know about, we’ll have a meeting with your team to review everything and give our assessment. 

The most important thing here is to ensure that none of Oracle’s patches are going to cause any problems with your system. Most of the time, your team is able to determine fairly quickly if there are going to be any problems, but we can also do our own set of testing. Either way, our team is ready to provide whatever assistance necessary should any issues arise.

4. Be Your Advocate With Oracle

Sitting on hold, waiting to talk to a customer service agent is time-consuming and one of the last things you want to worry about. As such, our team is ready to assist you with resolving any issues you need taken care of with Oracle. We’ll submit the ticket for you, interface with Oracle, and then confer with you when it’s time to come up with a resolution. In doing so, your team will have more time to focus on what really matters: growing your business. 

5. Process Reviews With Experts in Their Respective Fields

It costs a lot of money to have a team full of experts, so we’ve assembled it for you. Our consultants are laser-focused on functional processes ranging from Procure to Pay (Purchasing to Payables) and Order to Cash (Order Management to Receivables), to Make to Deliver (Manufacturing to Shipping) and everything in between. With so much exposure to such a diverse set of fields, our team can help yours solve just about any issue that may arise on an as-needed basis. 

6. Assist With Integrations and Extensions Where Practical

More often than not, we meet with clients who have a litany of systems (both cloud and on-premises) that would greatly benefit from a direct integration with Oracle. We believe that having a single point of entry for all of your systems will simplify your businesses operations, while also making them more efficient and accurate. As a result, we can help your business integrate all of your systems with Oracle, getting you the most out of your operational costs. 

This post was originally published by CTR.  CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023. 

Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Data, Finance, Financial Services, Latest News — No Comments ↓

Source: EY Reporting

Regarding the recent interview with Mr. Ranganath D. Mavinakere, the CFO of Infosys said today the CFO’s role has evolved considerably, it is not limited to finance and accounts rather, increasingly, they are now playing a central role in strategy formulation and execution.

Ultimately, the outcome of corporate strategy is measured in financials, be it revenues, margins, earnings per share, or the return on capital employed. And all risks – whether they relate to people, technology, HR, or strategy – have a financial implication.

As a result, the CFO and the finance organization must have an extraordinary view of the enterprise – a view that other function leaders cannot have and to be in a better position to work with other business functions, to advise them, and to help them make the right strategic choices.

The new-age CFO is someone who not only takes on the traditional roles of financial control, financial integrity, transparency, timely accounting, and checks and balances but also has a 360-degree view of the entire business.

This helps in two ways, “First, it helps to challenge some of the business assumptions more confidently and emphatically. Second, it helps predict the financial impact of any business decision more accurately.” That’s because every decision, big or small, has either a profit-and-loss impact or a balance-sheet impact.

The most exciting part of the CFO job is to face several ever-evolving challenges. Digital disruption continues to change how business gets done everywhere, from self-driving cars to closing the books. Additionally, businesses embracing hybrid business models that are bridging the internet-brick-and-mortar gap need to experiment and innovate without spending significant amounts of capital and resources.

Meanwhile, globalization demands that companies comply with local laws and accounting requirements while simultaneously managing operations in each country. And, as if all of this is not enough, regulatory burdens continue to grow, and the CFO still needs to hit the quarterly numbers.

The Cloud, the CFO, and NetSuite

Source: NetSuite

A CFO who Leads by Focusing Resources on What Matters Most

It is the CFO that leads the planning process, establishing the goals and how funds will be invested each year, and for that they need a scalable infrastructure that can provide a single source of truth and actionable business intelligence.

Combining business acumen and expertise with NetSuite’s unified data model, the CFO can deliver actionable business intelligence across the entire enterprise by putting real-time data in the hands of the decision-makers, on any device, at any time.

A CFO who Transforms Proactively and Reactively

The best way a CFO can make sure that the organization thrives is to put in place a flexible infrastructure that can react to an ever-changing environment. Today’s CFOs need a platform such as NetSuite that does not compromise between scalability and control.

As business goes global, the CFO has to facilitate the transformation of multi-currency, multi-lingual, multi-book, and different statutory requirements with efficiency. Failure to do so can result in degrading a company’s operational consistency, controls, and visibility into standalone foreign operations. In these situations, the goal of maintaining one version of the truth is unobtainable.

A CFO who Operates the Finance Function Effectively and Efficiently

While leading and transforming, the CFO has another thing to do – run the existing finance function in an effective an efficient manner. In some cases, this can be more demanding than anything else a CFO does, but it must be done, and done very well.

With the ever-increasing amount of regulations, tax laws that are local, state, national and international, maintaining strong internal controls and corporate governance and reporting information that is accurate, actionable, and readily available can be enough of a challenge by themselves. Embracing the right software platform like NetSuite can make managing this menagerie simple.

 It is also important to get the information into the hands of decision-makers in a timely and accurate manner. The standard approach of generating reports (often through Excel spreadsheets) is no longer sufficient. CFOs need a system that puts actionable business intelligence and alerts in the hands of decision-makers in real time via mobile devices in an easy-to-understand format.

This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023. 

Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Celebration, Latest News — No Comments ↓

Last week our AST Lisle office had their annual Ugly Sweater and White Elephant Holiday Party. This momentous time of year is a great reminder about how much we have to be thankful to each other for and share our lives in celebration. What a wonderful way to end the year!

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Posted on by AST LLC Posted in Community, Latest News — No Comments ↓

This year our AST Dallas office collected donations to provide coats to a 4th grade class at the Cesar Chavez learning center in the Dallas ISD. We not only delivered coats but by the looks of it we also delivered smiles. It’s so heartwarming to know they will be bundled up as we Texans know January is always the coldest month. Glad to be part of an organization that gives back to their local communities. Thank you all who contributed Texas Team! 

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