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We have launched our podcast series “Ask QueBIT about Analytics” to share what we have learned with real life stories and practical advice that we hope will help you on your analytics journey. If you are a manager on the front-lines, how do you make the best decisions for your business? It helps if you have easy and immediate access to relevant data, and in a form (mobile vs desktop, image vs spreadsheet grid etc.) that makes sense for the situation. Analytics is the science – and art – of m ...
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Episode 62: Taking Technology Fandom to the Next Level Guest: Christoph Hein Most of us are ambivalent about the technology we use at work. Ideally, we don’t even want to think about it. We know that technology enables business operations to proceed at a speed and scale that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago. In fact, anytime our wo…
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Episode 61: ESG and Sustainability Reporting Primer Guest: Bill Primerano ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and Sustainability Reporting requirements for businesses are well on their way to becoming unavoidable. For some companies it’s another example of costly government overreach that adds to the workloads of an already stretched workfo…
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Episode 59: Analytics Shorts: 3 Stories Guests: Tyler King, Deepak Kumar, A.G. Tan This week we are showcasing three of QueBIT’s expert consultants: Tyler King, Deepak Kumar and A.G. Tan. They have so many great stores to tell, but very little spare time, so we came up with this idea of the three-minute-story. Tell us about a favorite project in ab…
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Episode 59: Breaking Down Silos between Finance and Operations Guest: Amyn Dhamani Specialized functions – or “Silos” – evolve in companies for a very good reason. It’s simply more efficient to clearly partition all the work that needs to be done, so that everyone knows what is expected of them without having to spend a ton of time coordinating and…
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Episode 58: Whatever happened to IBM Watson? Guest: Mike McGeein, IBM In early 2011 a computer called Watson, developed by IBM, stunned the world by beating two of the all-time best human players of Jeopardy, a TV quiz show. To pull this off, Watson had to navigate vast amounts of unstructured knowledge, while also dealing with uncertainty, adding …
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Episode 57: How to be a Transformative CFO Guest: Brian Frohn Large influential consultancies like McKinsey, Gartner and others have been talking for several years now about how the responsibilities of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) are expanding to include their companies’ digital activities. This makes sense, since the Office of Finance is the…
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Episode 56: Predictive Planning for Finance Guest: Justin Croft How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help the Office of Finance? Since most of the AI use-cases in the media revolve around intelligent assistants (like Siri and Alexa), or self-driving cars, it can be hard for those of us who support businesses in quantitative functions – such as Fina…
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Episode 55: A New Era for Procurement and Sourcing Guest: Bryan Baum/Anaplan Procurement and Sourcing are critical functions, especially at companies whose prosperity depends on maintaining well-oiled supply chains. A job that requires diligence and attention to detail under normal circumstances, suddenly calls for quick decisions and agility, when…
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Guest: Deepak Kumar As a company grows and needs to develop specialized functions such as “Sales”, “Operations” and “Finance”, keeping everyone coordinated and on the same page takes more and more concerted effort. Over time, this natural separation leads to separate systems, business processes and data sets, since different functions have varying …
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Guest: Bruna Garcia In 2021 “Supply Chain” went from being an esoteric piece of business jargon, to being a household phrase. We will leave it to the popular press to fan the flames of public anxiety while lambasting industries plagued with Supply Chain problems. Instead, we will dig into how companies plan both demand and supply in order to manage…
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Episode 52: Allocations for the Insurance Industry Guest: Chris Willson Isn’t profitability the same as revenue? Why does the difference matter? If these questions sound boring, how about this one: How would you feel if you went out to an expensive dinner with your siblings and agreed ahead-of-time to split the check equally, but then one sibling o…
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Episode 51: Accelerating down the Home Stretch of xP&A Guest: Andy Weiss Some of the most important beneficiaries of a good Planning & Analysis process are on the front lines of the business. These are the people in sales, operations and line management whose day jobs are emphatically not about planning and analysis, but about building relationship…
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Episode 50: End-to-end Integrated Planning Processes at Chemtura Guest: Jessica Quiles Everyone is talking about Extended Planning and Analysis – or xP&A – these days. On paper, it is easy to appreciate the benefits of integrating planning across finance and operational functions, which include making it easier to get everyone working together towa…
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Episode 49: The Importance of Data Strategy for xP&A Guest: Mike Burke At which point does the “data” part of your planning project start to take center-stage? When you go beyond grabbing general ledger trial balances from a single data source, to wanting to truly mine more of your enterprise data for deeper insights, more accurate forecasting, and…
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Episode 48: Hybrid Cloud for Planning, Reporting and Analysis Guest: Mike Cowie It’s the summer of 2021 and IBM has been airing a series of TV commercials on something called “hybrid cloud”. One of them features racing driver Jamie Chadwick asking “why should your business go hybrid?”, and concluding “... so you can focus on, you know, winning!”. A…
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Episode 47: Why xP&A is not just marketing hype No guest Extended Planning and Analysis – or xP&A – is having a moment right now. It is the latest piece of jargon being hyped up by analysts like Gartner (who coined it) and planning software vendors like Anaplan, IBM and Workday Adaptive. Even QueBIT is talking about it! But is it JUST hype? In this…
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Episode 46: Taking the First Step Guest: John Sterner It’s interesting how human beings are used to planning journeys through life – like vacations, going to college, and retirement – but when it comes to buying technology, there can be a tendency to want everything at once. Perhaps it is because there is “software program” involved? Perhaps softwa…
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Episode 45: Software Evaluation Principles Guest: Christine Schoenen There is so much technology being thrown at us each day that deciding which software tools to invest in is overwhelming. It’s one thing to take a chance on a free app on your phone, but a completely different thing to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more!) on something like…
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Episode 44: The Sad Truth about Data No guest. “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” is a famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison. The QueBIT version of this is “Successful analytics is one percent modeling and 99 percent data preparation”! When you are shopping for technology, just as when you are shopping for anything, …
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Episode 43: 2020, The Year of Analytics No guest. 2020 was a difficult year on many fronts. It was also a year when companies needed to get more out of analytics technologies, to mitigate some of the challenges. Analytics evolved from being a “nice-to-have” to being an absolute necessity. Analytics helps you monitor what’s going on in your business…
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Episode 42: Launching a Diversity and Inclusion Program Guests: Andrew Chavis, Dallas Crawford, Odile Davis-Wolfe & Gus Slaughter In Episode 39 we talked about how companies that have inclusive cultures and embrace diversity also end up with real business advantages. These are a consequence of attracting the best talent, and then creating the condi…
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Episode 41: From “spreadsheet hell” to better decisions at Eversource Guest: Fran Berger As the largest utility in New England, Eversource has all the planning and reporting needs one would expect of a Fortune 500 company – and maybe more! Operating in a highly regulated and unionized industry while also a public company, not to mention occasional …
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Episode 40: Why Master Data Management Matters Guest: Clare Hutton Our clients often ask us whether we “do” Master Data Management (MDM). It’s a good question because Master Data Management is important to DO, but answering the question can feel a bit like tip-toeing through a minefield. This is because the term “Master Data Management” means diffe…
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Episode 39: Diversity, Inclusion … and Transformative Analytics No guest This episode was partly inspired by an article in the November-December 2020 issue of the Harvard Business Review titled “Getting Serious about Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case”. The point of the article is that harnessing diversity to add value to your busines…
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Episode 38: You can’t have Agile Planning without Building Models Guest: Richard Creeth Most businesses rely on spreadsheets as a tool to inform, and to drive decision-making. Often these spreadsheets contain models where certain inputs drive calculations to produce outputs. Examples of common calculations include [Units] * [Price] or sales project…
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Episode 37: Learning about Splunk Guest: Jim Miller It’s not easy keeping up with technology but one of QueBIT’s Master Consultants, Jim Miller, has found a neat way to do it: he writes technology books in his free time! Jim’s latest book, which will be available at the end of the month, is called Mastering Splunk 8. In this episode Jim gives us a …
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Episode 36: Analytics Shorts: 3 Stories Guests: Christine Schoenen, Dan Viterise, Jim Miller This week we are showcasing three of QueBIT’s expert consultants: Christine Schoenen, Dan Viterise and Jim Miller. They have so many great stores to tell, but very little spare time, so we came up with this idea of the three-minute-story. Tell us about a fa…
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Guest: Gary Quirke What do “cash forecasting” and “looking out for bears” have in common? Both these activities have existential consequences. The damage a bear can cause is obviously terrifying to think of, but if your company runs out of cash and you lose your job as a result it can be quite frightening too. A company with a good model-driven cas…
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Guest: AG Tan Planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis are core business activities served by analytics technology. Many companies are busily re-doing plans and forecasts in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, to figure out how to stay in business (when demand has plummeted) or how to maximize capacity (when demand has sky-rocketed). At th…
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Guests: Justin Croft and James Saronson When there is so much going on around you that you can’t do anything about, it is helpful to reflect on the things you can control. If your job involves business planning and forecasting, it’s about becoming more comfortable with uncertainty. This can be done by exploring a range of possible scenarios ahead o…
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Episode 32: Embedding AI in FPA Replay Guest: AG Tan This episode is a replay of an in-person keynote presentation delivered at IBM’s offices in New York City in November 2019. The purpose of the talk was to demystify the value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for planning and forecasting use cases in extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A = integrate…
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Episode 31: Analytics in Uncertain Times: COVID-19 edition Guest: Gary Quirke QueBIT has clients from all industries, that range in size from smaller and mid-sized businesses to giant global companies. Surveying our client base is like looking at a microcosm of business in general, and so in this week’s podcast episode, we speak with QueBIT CEO Gar…
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Episode 30: Analytics for Hospitality & Property Management Guest: Walter Hugo Añez Customer experience is a hot topic in every business these days, but in the hospitality industry it has always been paramount! When you walk in the doors of a hotel or a resort as a customer, your expectations are already sky-high. No one goes on an expensive vacati…
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Episode 29: Predictive Forecasting: Under the Covers Guest: Scott Mutchler If you have ever worried that Predictive Forecasting as an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning is more hype than reality, then this podcast episode is for you! There is a lot of superficial information being put out to sell us all a gleaming visi…
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Episode 28: The Challenge of Implementing Analytics on a Global Scale Guest: Dan Viterise People, especially developers and other technologists like me, tend to view analytics projects through the lens of “the technical challenge”. Even if we know that activities like “requirements gathering” and “getting buy-in” are important, they may still be al…
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Episode 27: Analytics in the Health Insurance Industry Guest: Ryan McKinney If you heard that profit margins in the health insurance industry can be as low as 3%, would you be surprised? Much as consumers like to complain about health insurers, let’s also give them their due because they are in a difficult business! In this week’s podcast, Ryan McK…
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Episode 26: Trusting the AI Forecast in Finance Guest: Allen Hudson Many companies are looking for a way to transcend the limitations of Excel for financial and operational planning, reporting and analysis. They need something that will enable them to securely centralize their data and models (so that both numbers and calculations are managed in ju…
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Episode 25: IBM Cognos Analytics – a New Paradigm for Business Intelligence Guest: Gus Slaughter Back in the early 2000s Cognos was the leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) platforms. In July 2008 Forrester Research recognized Cognos Business Intelligence as the most modern and scalable BI platform on the market. Cognos BI brought “pixel…
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Episode 24: Planning for Change Management Guest: Brian Moore Regardless of whether you like or dislike change, the best way to manage it is to assume there will be disruption! When change comes to a business in the form of a new software solution, we sometimes forget the disruption part because (by definition) a new software solution will be “bett…
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Episode 23 - Predictive Price Optimization Guest: James Saronson How to price your product or service is a fundamental question in any business. If you price too high, you may sell less than you might, and if you price too low you may earn less than you might. Either of these scenarios can affect profit margins. To further complicate matters, the “…
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Episode 22: A Practical Approach to Innovation in Analytics Guest: Andreas Kugelmeier, IBM Innovation is much easier to talk about than to do in practice. Challenges include getting buy-in from groups you depend on but have little leverage over, and resisting the urge to go for a BIG vision. In this episode, Andreas Kugelmeier from the IBM Data and…
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Episode 21: Everything you always wanted to know about Testing Guest: Jim Brinnen When implementing a new analytics system, testing is sometimes treated as a “nice-to-have” rather than a core requirement. While no one says up-front that testing is a low priority, it is not unusual for there to be inadequate dollars, time and planning set aside for …
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Episode 20: Data Virtualization Guest: Keith Hollen Data Virtualization technologies can be used in a number of different ways, including real-time operational reporting and analytics against multiple source systems, and quick-and-dirty data exploration! As business users increasingly expect to have direct access to data for self-service analytics,…
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Episode 19: Lean Demand Forecasting Guest: Dan Barrett Dan Barrett, QueBIT’s Advanced Analytics Technical Sales Manager, claims that MOST companies waste far too much time on demand forecasting! Considering how crucial an accurate demand forecast is to planning your supply chain, this is a bold statement. Keep in mind that Dan is NOT saying that yo…
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Episode 18: The Evolution of Business Intelligence Guest: Robin Wilkinson It turns out that Business Intelligence (BI), as a concept, has been around since 1865! Back then it was a manual paper and pencil process, but it still enabled one business to prevail over its competitors by making better data driven decisions. Today we are dealing with mass…
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Episode 17: Analytics for Retail Buyers Guest: Jim Hanifin As on-line shopping becomes the norm, the traditional retail industry is going through a lot of adjustments. Employing analytics technology to increase operational efficiency and make better decisions faster is an obvious avenue to take. In this episode we speak with Jim Hanifin who recount…
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Episode 16: How to become an Analytics Expert Guests: Daniel Williams, Odile Davis Wolfe, Pete Horgan QueBIT has grown by cross-training business and finance people in analytics technology, and by cross-training engineers and computer scientists in business and finance. Meanwhile analytics experts such as data scientists are at a premium in the mar…
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Episode 15: A Financial Consolidation is an Analytics project! Financial Analytics is an important branch of the field of Analytics. It involves data management, modeling and reporting. A Financial Consolidation system is a Financial Analytics project that brings together data from one or more ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system together with…
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Episode 14: Nerding out on FP&A! Guest: Beth Thomas The Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) function is the original analytics function within any organization. The Profit & Loss (P&L), Balance Sheet and other financial statements tell the story of the business. When they are correct, timely, and reach the right audience, they are invaluable for i…
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Episode 13: The Evolution of Analytics Solutions Guest: Gary Corrigan 15 years ago, when Gary Corrigan first sold analytics technologies, customers were looking for technology platforms. Today the landscape has changed, and customers are now looking for solutions to their specific business problems. That’s a significant change! It’s as though custo…
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