Senior Management Looking More Closely at Enterprise-wide Analytics

C-level focus is now on demand-driven metrics as compliance, investors and global pressures weigh, says Silvon president

Oak Brook, IL — October 18, 2005 — Senior management at corporations around the world is increasingly focusing on enhancing the performance of their business through demand-driven metrics, according to Mike Hennel, the president of Silvon Software, speaking at the company's user group conference this year.

Hennel was the keynote speaker this week at Profit 2005 - Making Information Pay for the Demand-Driven Enterprise, this year's Silvon Software Users Group Conference.

"Seven or eight years ago, you probably didn't see the president or CEO involved with the evaluation of analytical software packages," Hennel told attendees. "Now you always see the president or CEO in demos."

Key Drivers

Hennel said there are four key drivers leading senior management to look to enterprise-wide analytics to manage their demand-driven businesses:

• Sarbanes-Oxley compliance — "The requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley are forcing publicly traded companies to be able to verify and validate their data," Hennel said. "Our customers are already using analytics such as Silvon's Stratum Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite to improve their performance in customer profitability, better demand forecasting and visibility, and revenue growth. Now C-level executives are finding that tools like Stratum give them better visibility into the data that sits in their transaction systems and enables them to figure out pretty easily if there are any anomalies of what is going on in their business."



• Investor demands — "Senior management can get beaten up by the investment banks about how they are running the business," Hennel said. "The traditional tools of income statements and balance sheets are no longer good enough. In the old days, much of the discussion on the quarterly earnings calls just focused on financial performance. Now CEOs are getting more and more questions on these calls about what they are going to do to drive operations."



• Global consistency — "Our customers are now focused on how to get more global consistency and visibility into what is happening within their organizations and managing the data the same way across the board," Hennel said. "For instance, they may be doing well in one region or one product line, but not in another. They are looking to analytics to help them find out the causes for these variabilities in performance beforehand, instead of after the fact, so their business can be hitting on all cylinders. This helps them to ensure that they are managing the data the same way across the enterprise."



• Dashboards — "Companies using scorecards and portals to get dashboards of their key indicators are changing the whole mindset of how to drive the business operationally," Hennel said. "It gets everyone in the company aligned so they know the key metrics they need to be focused on to help improve performance."

Getting Customer-centric

Hennel said EPM software solutions such as Stratum are designed to sense and respond to real-time demand by distributing information across the supply chain network — internally, with suppliers, and with customers.

"Customer-centric supply chain operations aren't just about software," Hennel concluded. "You have to be able to leverage the business processes and technology together. EPM applications enable companies to do just that. They can capture and unify actual demand, and also create demand intelligence and insights to drive their businesses forward."

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Additional Articles of Interest

— Supply chain executives are discovering new ways to apply technology and innovative processes to the challenge of managing uncertainty. Read more in "Rethinking Risk," cover story in the August/September 2005 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

— Eugene McCabe, architect of Sun Microsystems' Customer Fulfillment in Transit process, discusses the challenges and rewards of taking links out of the company's supply chain in "Anatomy of the 'Zero Touch' Supply Chain," in the August/September 2005 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

— Learning the right things to say to your colleagues and your customers can help you win big for the Supply Chain. Read more in "The Price of Talk," the Final Thoughts column in the August/September 2005 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

• More articles about Silvon Software.

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