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Three Critical Strategic Planning Lessons Gleaned from Moneyball

February 2014

By: Jon Louvar, Manager of Financial Planning, InsightSoftware.com


Three Critical Strategies Gleaned from Moneyball

There is a great scene at the start of the movie, Moneyball. Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is sitting in a planning meeting with his scouts and he asks them to define the problem. “What is our problem?” he continues to ask each person. Repeatedly, each person fails to define what the real problem is. They haven’t figured out that their model is outdated. No one can see past the outdated ways they have always used. And unless they redefine the process, they will hit the very same wall over and over again.

This has strange similarities to strategic planning practices in business. The failure to look beyond traditional metrics like batting averages and RBIs is analogous to the rear-view mirror approach most companies take with planning. Think about it. The labor-hours and inefficiencies that go into predicting a future result is one of the (if not the) most significant time and resource investment in finance. Especially since, let’s face it, by the time corporate budgets are finished, they are usually inaccurate and outdated.

In Moneyball, redefining the question was the path to getting the right answer. In order to accurately plan for the future, you need to understand the whole picture. But your data is disconnected - living separately in shadow data systems and silos. The game has changed. The volume, utilization and speed of real-time information has risen significantly. The time has come to ask a new question: how can we integrate more relevant, real-time happenings that are outside the capabilities of our ERP for fast, efficient data delivery?

It may seem like a daunting task but let’s break it down and take a few lessons from Moneyball.

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“We’ve got to think differently.”In Moneyball, Billy Beane was backed into a corner with his payroll. He was looking for a smarter way out. Similarly, corporations have been backed into a corner by their ERP. Think about it. Ideally, your ERP should provide you one single source of truth for your business data. But they do not typically contain all the requirements businesses need to support that vision.

So what are you to do? You need a way to see your data, so you are forced into disparate means of data collection. This means spreadsheets, shadow data systems, or new technology purchases that only solve a sliver of the problem. Maintaining integrity of information once it is taken outside your ERP is a massive struggle. Automatically, you lose your center of truth. It is a drain on resources at all levels to try to enable the business to share and leverage critical information.

My Moneyball suggestion to you? Reshape the problem. Stop looking for another tool to fill a one-off requirement or find another way to manage your silos of information. Change the paradigm. What’s the real problem? The real problem is that you do not have one centralized version of the truth. The minute you store and rely on data in spreadsheets or agree to multiple data sources, chaos ensues. Data being pulled out of the ERP becomes static and outdated and can cause inconsistencies and reconciliation issues. And if multiple people are gathering the same data separately, this leads to misinformation and time wasted. Find a way to stop the silos and centralize all of your data in one place.

One major push around this effort is a concept known as “homing data,” which can be defined as centralizing both data collection and data storage in your ERP. Homing data practices make it practical for everyone in the organization to see and access data intelligently.

When data can easily be collected from the field and stored in your ERP, strategic planning processes become simple. For example, service employees that work with customers on site can easily enter timesheet data to record important information e.g. the number of hours to complete a project. In turn, corporate accounting can use this data for invoice billing reconciliation, and at the same time, study the efficiency of particular services, choosing to discontinue or amend jobs that are not profitable. It is a smarter way to do things and get much better results.

“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening.”

Every company has a Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) working for them. Not in the sense that he is a statistical genius, but in the sense that he sees the forest from the trees, he sees the important role that real-time plays in the organization.

The number of people sharing and advocating this vision is only going to increase. In a few short years, Gen Y will be more or less running the business world. Think about the values they find sacred in their consumer products: simplicity, universal access, and instantaneous results. Gen Y will eventually insist that enterprise software caters to these requirements.


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• Simplicity: When we say simple, we don’t mean unintelligent. In fact we mean the exact opposite. People want to be able to see and work with more and more data in a clean, intuitive way. They want one tool with multiple functionalities.

• Universal Access: There is a growing trend to expand business information and the tools to analyze it out to the end users, no longer just IT. Products are becoming more accessible by non-technical users in order for this to happen.

• Instantaneous results: Instead of hunting for information, people are expecting to see exactly what they need, when they need it. Real-time data is imperative for quick, confident action.

So when it comes to the current process of corporate planning, what is really happening? We spend too much time chasing information that lives outside the ERP (weeks, months even). By the time it is collected, data is stale, outdated, and nearly useless.

The good news is, with the rise of the above mentioned trends, PWC research has found that 71% of companies are investing in budgeting, planning, and forecasting solutions in the next 1-2 years. The Peter Brands are stepping up.

“The willingness of respondents to address the shortcomings of their current systems shows that they have a vision of the performance management capabilities required. Planning and budgeting cycles need to be counted in days rather than weeks or months, and management reports need to provide insight into operational variances that underpin the numbers and lead to more informed decision making. They also recognise the need for clean data that represents a ‘single version of the truth’ with the ability to access this information almost instantly, while there’s time to act on it.”1

-PWC “Closing the Gap in Performance Management”

Let’s explore the impact of real-time planning. If you had instantaneous data about the future demand for a new product at the inventory item level, in a moment, users could see associations that weren’t previously recognized. Simply view summary and detail data relationships by item number, or customer, or business unit. Silos would be shattered and the resulting sum of all data would be greater than its individual parts.

Or, if your organization is planning capital expenditures for next year, homing data with real-time analytics would enable your users to collect information about expected acquisitions using location, vendor, purchase cost, estimated life, and other relevant information necessary to calculate depreciation expense. Data brought back to one single location (the ERP), and in real-time, can help identify future cash flow requirements, or assist buyers with negotiating purchase discounts.


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Fast, accurate information that results in action is the key to business success. And when it comes to speed and transaction level, people are continuing to raise the bar. The need for faster, personal solutions that replace many with one is growing rapidly in the business.

“He passes the eye candy test. He’s got the looks; he’s great at playing the part.”

Since budgeting, forecasting, and planning processes in most organizations are inherently flawed, investing in a strategic planning solution often becomes a game of finding the less of all evils. A common mistake companies make is investing in a solution simply because it looks the part. In the long run, it doesn’t matter if something looks good on paper; you want it to be able to actually do the job.

Moneyball used the example of Johnny Damon. Peter Brand explained how the Red Sox saw Damon as a star that was worth seven and a half million dollars a year. But Brand saw Damon as an imperfect understanding of where scoring runs come from. In fact, he felt the decision to remove Damon off the payroll opened up all kinds of interesting possibilities for Beane.

In the planning world, there are a lot of big players like Damon in the market. Do they have a good glove; can they steal bases? Sure. But are they worth the huge monetary investment? Probably not.

Peter Brand says, “your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins.” Companies don’t want to find a solution that simply connects all the silos of data together into a data warehouse that produces latent data. They are screaming out: I can’t manage my payroll, or I can’t predict sales accurately because the data is off in a spreadsheet. My suggestion? Fire the Johnny Damon’s and put your hiring efforts into a player that will enable continuous, real-time business monitoring.

For Beane, removing Damon was not just about the seven and a half million dollar payroll. It was about focusing on the strength of his team members that helped him achieve his actual goal—more wins. In order to “win,” you need an environment that streams information. Here are the game rules you need to play by in order to achieve your strategic planning win:

• Do not waste your time with a lengthy implementation. It is just not acceptable anymore to wait months to see results your company needs now. Pick a solution that will install and be running over your data as quickly as possible.

• Do not leave anyone out. All your employees need access to certain types of data. It should not be limited to a select few in the organization. The more you can democratize data to the end users, the healthier and smarter your business will run.


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• Do not settle for anything less than real-time. Data latency only slows down business decisions. As the world becomes more mobile and instantaneous, real-time access to live data will move from giving you an excellent competitive advantage to becoming a necessity. The only way to keep a finger on the pulse of the business is to have visibility to all the moving parts whenever you need it.

• Do not enable the silos. People love spreadsheets, especially finance. It is really no wonder they do. Spreadsheets enable them to actually do their job when they have no easier option. Find a solution that centralizes data collection and data storage in one location (i.e., your ERP). Your whole company can work with a single source of truth. Provide the flexibility and integration to slice and dice data on the fly and there will be no need for silos.

We Are Changing the Game

Moneyball was all about seeing something that was not right and deciding to fix it. The amount of data that exists in one-off systems and spreadsheets in your organization is not right. This produces one-off spreadsheets and version control issues that permeate across your entire business - potentially thousands of distributed activities across thousands of people. It doesn’t feel practical spending weeks and weeks trying to collect and make sense of static data only to be forced to make bad decisions about the future.

The best ideas may somehow seem unconventional until they are played out. So imagine this. Imagine if by thinking about things differently, you could revolutionize the way your people interact with each other and their data. Your business needs one spot where you collect and store all information, a spot that enables supreme visibility and immediate feedback without delay. A coherent system that allows users to build their own apps as needed and also incorporate vigorous reporting capabilities. Users will actually see all the data they need right when they need it. This is data-driven forecasting and planning at its finest.

For more information on a game changing strategic planning solution, visit www.insightsoftware.com/planning

1. PWC “Closing the Gap in Performance Management”, David Werrett, June 2013

Sources:

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