Connected Planning, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 8Execute: From Insights to Actions to Results

Vision without execution is hallucination.

—THOMAS A. EDISON

As I wrote in the first edition of this book, planning, budgeting, and forecasting are the cornerstones of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). You can break down the “E” in EPM to any part of the enterprise: sales, marketing, order to cash, supply chain, workforce, and so on. You can even follow the value chain to organizations you partner with. When you focus on each of these parts, they follow the same closed-loop cycle, work off the same data, metadata, and rules, and are enabled by the same technology. The more you unify these components for each part of the enterprise, the less you spend on reinventing the wheel, reworking reports, plans, models, and analyses, and the more you can agree on the numbers. All of the tools and training and strategy for Connected Planning are great, but if you don't execute better, what's the point? In this chapter we focus on execution through different performance use cases.

The 10-Step Insight Process

It's not enough to collect, maintain, govern, and disseminate data. You have to put it to work if you want to use it to gain a competitive advantage in the market. To put it to work, you have to develop a discipline of transformation and action. Ideally this includes thinking big and starting small: have a Connected Planning vision and framework into which you deliver quick-win applications. The goal is to start generating ...