A case study.
For many years the CEO of a premier consumer products company insisted on a monthly business review process that was highly data-intensive. At its core was a“book” that contained cost and sales data for every product sold by the company, broken down by business unit, channel, geography, and consumer segment. This book (available electronically but always printed by the executive team) was several inches thick. It was produced each month by many hundreds of finance, product management, and information technology people who spent thousands of hours collecting, assessing, analyzing, reconciling, and sorting the data.Since this was the CEO’s way of running the business, no one really questioned whether all of this activity was worth it, although many complained about the time required. When a new CEO came on the scene a couple of years ago, however, he decided that the business would do just fine with quarterly reviews and exception-only reporting. Suddenly the entire data-production industry of the company was reduced substantially—and the company didn’t miss a beat.
No comments:
Post a Comment