What Do I Wake Up for in the Morning?

Posted on February 14, 2016
Location: London
What Do I Wake Up for in the Morning?

My Dad worked as an accountant, my grandfather was an accountant too in a government department, and my uncles are bank managers. I was born with this heirloom. The sound of typewriters/calculators, the sights of big-thick ledger books/cash-memos knotted with red cotton material, lying all around our home, is something I grew up with. Most of the rich and famous from the province were regulars at our home or let’s say at the home office of my Dad. Difference was these rich and famous who looked confident and satisfied socially elsewhere; but looked helpless and anxious at our home. They were trying to find answers to something perhaps! Answer to “WHY?!”

Things have changed for good in last two decades. Accountants do not use labour-intensive type-writers or calculators. Thick and heavy ledger books are distant reality now. They are replaced with sophisticated desktop computers and accounting software. Holding on to the historical data does not occupy the precious home or office space anymore. We have landed in an age now, where all these are fitted well within the single terminology “data”, which is held with tiniest space possible, either within our premises or up somewhere, which we then label as “Cloud data”. 

Speaking of data, we live literally in a data-rich world. Data is raw, unprocessed, untransformed, unorganized and available everywhere. When the same data is processed, organized, structured or presented in a given context so as to make it useful and meaningful, it is called information. Adequacy and Relevance must be considered; otherwise we are overloaded with information.

I grew up in a small town of India in late eighties early nineties. Traditionally; those days in India, parents choose what their children must study. My parents had decided Science and Engineering for me. They invested money, provided me every support for me to graduate as an Electronics and Telecomm Engineer. I did, but I was not happy because I was not sure if I liked that subject or wanted to continue. I was too young to contemplate. I started applying to universities in the United States and United Kingdom to pursue MBA. I wonder why? Why did I choose to apply for MBA? My parents did not persuade me! Why I wanted to study MBA? Did not know the exact answer at this stage… the expedition continued therefore.

Immediately after passing out my engineering, I was lucky to be inducted into a job where I was trained to work with enterprise application software, which is famously known as SAP… Systems Applications Products in Data Processing. That’s it. That is what SAP stands for. SAP processes data, generated data. Cool! What do we do with this data? Do we just archive it in every few years, store elsewhere and anticipate that we may refer to them in future? That was in the past but now we do lot of interesting and intelligent analysis with historical data. We try to find patterns, derive formulas to sustain those patterns, develop algorithms to emulate success year after year. Then we benchmark the result set, with our market averages and competitors in the market from same or different industry. Jolly exciting stuff. These take most part of my dreams in the night. Shhhhhsssss. This is the world…I call the world of WHYs. A layer, where my interest lies, my intelligence fits and my passion clicks. Remember I told you how my expedition continued after completing my engineering studies…it ended here…with the completion of my chartered accounting studies and being successfully inducted into the world of WHYs.

Data provides answers to three important foundations of any business. WHAT…HOW…WHY. These three notions are so huge that it is often difficult to deal with them together. How do I explain WHAT…HOW…WHY? “WHAT” is all about our products and services. “HOW” takes care of processes, control and resources. And “WHY” answers result, future and the effectiveness. Measurements of effectiveness are derived from our corporate objective, mission, passion & values. We often debate what should be sequence of business process flow between “What”…”How” and “Why” ? It’s like debating on whether the Chicken came first or the Egg? It is not always straight forward. Sometimes the answer comes with much experience, endurance & trial. But it does get to us finally, if we try and are keen. It could be very much possible at the end, for us to realize that both chicken and egg arrived at the same time with a bang. The WHY parts of the business equation delivers us those ultimate answers.

We humans are similar and divergent at the same time. We draw ourselves to people, subject, technology, attitude, meaning, value and need; very differently based on our belief, knowledge and environment. Some people are just happy harbouring around WHAT (Product, Services, Design, and Innovation) . That’s what they like and find satisfaction from. Some are brilliant and natural with HOW ( Processes, Control, Resources management and Delivery ). And others like me, inspired with WHY (Reason, What-if, Why should we, What we should not etc.) . My Dad asks me often “What do you think of yourself?!” Sisters think I am painfully inquisitive. Reason for their assertion is: I ask way too many questions. I always try getting to the bottom of any matter. I can’t simply leave it while it is still being interesting to me to dwell on. I shall continue to ask questions as long as my intensions are honest and it delivers the ultimate answer. I am the WHY-GUY.

That is the reason I wake up in the morning. I wake up effortlessly because my passion does not let me sleep. My passion breathes with WHY. And the world of WHY is exciting enough where; one day I feel like Sherlock Holmes of Data Exploration; other days as James Bond of Data Analysis; and today as Albert Einstein of Performance Intelligence, especially for  Valentine’s Day. Every day I play a different character, a different role, where I investigate corporate data, try to make out from what the data show us. No doubt astrology says; the natives of Libra on account of their ultimate attributes are bestowed with many career options including finance, designing, art, critics, composers, writers, management, entertainment, education, counsellor, mediators, judge, architect, psychologist, public service, astrologer, anchor, lawyer and minister.

It’s not easy. We need tool for every investigation and there are plenty of software tools available in the market which helps with data exploration, data navigation, and data transformation, data analysis and data visualization. They all vary with regards to their effectiveness in assisting with the investigation. My pick on this is SAP Analytics.  It has been 19 glorious years that I have been associated with SAP and perhaps I shall continue to strengthen this association for reminder of my life in some form or the other. I have no doubt SAP will continue to surprise me, impress me with introduction of their new-dimensional, next generation software products, regularly as they have been.

They say necessity (WHY) is the mother of invention. Today, the WHY factor is less than 30% of information workers use enterprise BI solutions; this number is often even as low as 10%. And 54% of companies foresee a need for a high-performance analytics strategy to be implemented throughout their organizations. SAP’s next generation analytics platforms provide answers to many of today’s complex business challenges and have been providing reliable business benefits for past four decades.

Business Benefits

  • Make better informed business decisions
  • Improve business planning
  • Monitor process performance
  • Ensure compliance and reduce risk
  • Improve customer satisfaction

Finance:

  • Visibility into key financial metrics
  • Optimized Working Capital
  • Clear understanding of Costs
  • Rapid Financial Close
  • Smooth Planning/Budgeting / Forecasting with ability to do “what-if” analyses
  • Profitability by all dimensions (Product, Customer, Region etc)
  • Efficiency of Finance Organization

Sales

  • Visibility into Revenues/Margins by all dimensions (customer/product/region)
  • Customer churn rates
  • Up-sell/Cross-sell opportunities
  • Performance by sales rep
  • Visibility into inventory levels
  • Improved understanding of ideal product mix
  • Ability to analyse and optimize pricing

Marketing

  • Measured effectiveness of latest campaigns 
  • Improve customer satisfaction & engagement
  • Return on Marketing investments
  • Ability to improve merchandising decisions
  • Develop effective/dynamic pricing strategies with insight into discounting and promotions
  • Ability to create tailored campaigns for different customer groups

Supply Chain:

  • Visibility into all supply chain KPI’s
  • Optimize inventory (Minimize volume of inventory whilst maximizing order fulfilment rate)
  • Lead Times (minimize)
  • Supply Chain efficiency
  • Maximize order fulfilment rate
  • Minimize transportation costs
  • Ensure that customers are served from the most optimal factories in terms of location, cost and capabilities

We shall connect very soon. Until later…

Faithfully Yours;

Bikash WHY Mohanty

Let’s remember: As is our belief, so is our behaviour and so is our outcome.

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