Profibility Analysis

Executive View

Top Level Objectives

Managing profitability is paramount in today’s environment. With all the challenges faced by an organization, scrutiny of profitably has never been more intense. Whether it is product offerings, customer related, partnership channels, key projects or other initiatives, stakeholders expect a thorough understanding of profitability that justifies investments.

Rolta has a long history of implementing profitability analysis systems. These solutions focus on key business components that extend beyond the traditional profit and loss statement. Through these solutions, management is able to track, plan and manage profitability in a multidimensional manner. For example, are we selling the right products to the right customers through the right channels to maximize profitability? Are we promoting the sales organization accordingly to drive sales according to the best product mix? Which customer and channel combination result in the most efficient cost of sales model while maximizing revenue? These simple business questions are often impossible to answer given the need to marry and analyze data from various systems. Rolta’s solutions align data with a business purpose to deliver the profitability information in a manner that is most effective for management.

Management can use this information to support both operational and strategic decisions. These solutions help an organization understand it’s “profitability portfolio”. The intent is to drive managerial decision making and support allocation of resource decisions (capital, human, fixed assets, etc.) towards the products, customers, channels, functions, processes and other business forces that will result in the highest and most efficient performance for the organization.

Solution - Innovation

Executives often struggle to obtain reporting and transparency on profitability outside the standard profit and loss statement. Traditionally organizations report profitability along organizational structures. This view does not generate an understanding of the profitability components at an actionable level of detail; product offerings across all business units for example. Add a second dimension, such as customer, and the data issues are exasperated. Rolta’s solution provides executives and management with a level of reporting that provides a true understanding of where and how an organization is profitable.

Advantage - Insight

Because of lack of visibility into the drivers of profitability, many organizations are left with no choice but to manage by gut feel and institutional tendencies. Rolta’s profitability solutions add the capabilities of factual data and robust analysis to support management. The barrier of collecting and aligning data according to how the business operates is removed by establishing a solution that solves those issues and provides a detailed level of analysis with robust drill downs, scenario modeling and comparative analysis.

Benefit - Impact

The ultimate goal of any organization is exceptional performance. Where profitability is concerned, understanding the true picture of the revenue and cost equation is paramount to success. It is through that insight that Rolta delivers solutions that help an organization improve the quality of day to day operations as well as strategic decisions that ultimately increase profitability.

Management View

Business Objectives

In many instances, the data needed to understand profitability in a meaningful way is simply not available. In other cases, the data is available but requires a significant amount of time and manual effort to construct it in a way that accurately represents the organization. In either case, the onus is on the analyst, manager or executive to collect, cleanse and model the data. Making this situation even more difficult is the fact that data is often needed from multiple source systems that don’t necessarily have common data definitions and structures.

The Rolta profitability solutions eliminate the data burden associated with profitability analysis. Data, whether from one or multiple sources, is made available to the users through automation and technology. This provides management with the view of profitability that is consistent with how the organization operates rather than based on accounting systems.

Solution

Rolta’s profitability solutions generate insight into an organization by providing views that aren’t otherwise available. This can take multiple forms depending on the industry and organization. Whether it is product profitability, customer profitability or another measure, these solutions are fully customizable to meet your needs.

Approach

Because of the unique requirements of profitability systems, customized solutions are required for each situation.

Rolta’s seasoned consultants have acquired these skills through years of experience implementing profitability solutions. These consultants are experts in not just the technology aspects of the solution but also in profitability methodologies. It is through these consultants and experience that Rolta delivers solutions that truly provide profitability insight.

Business Value

Rolta’s profitability solutions drive business value in many ways. Whether operational metrics, efficiency gains, expense reductions, impacts to key performance indicators, sales drivers or other measurements, the common denominator of our solutions is the focus on improving performance. This is accomplished through greater insight into the drivers of business performance which enables higher quality management and decision making.

Technical View

Technical Issues

Many organizations use spreadsheets to collect and analyze data. Usually a constraint is encountered around scalability. Also spreadsheets tend to lead to questions about the accuracy and integrity of the results because the modeling is performed by individuals. The rolta solution moves this model into a centralized and dynamic data repository and analytic system. It becomes an enterprise platform for reporting and analysis.

Like most departments, IT organizations are challenged with reducing expenditures in today’s environment leading to prioritization of initiatives. Often IT departments must focus on business critical systems and applications, leaving the business on their own in performing deep analysis. Inevitably, business users take matters into their own hands and build profitability solutions in spreadsheets. Unfortunately, there are major barriers with this approach.

Data acquisition is one such hurdle. Business users may not have access to all data or the right data to perform profitability analysis. Usually multiple systems are involved to marry financial data from the general ledger with detailed data such as at the product or customer levels. Once users do obtain data, it is usually imported into spreadsheets where a convoluted method of mapping, cleansing and standardizing the data is performed in a unique way for that user and purpose only. This rogue approach is not only inefficient but also often lacks the appropriate data, business rule and IT standards. Compounding the issue is the vulnerability of spreadsheets to human error and data integrity issues.

The Rolta solutions address these issues by performing the heavy lifting (i.e. data acquisition, cleansing, conforming, calculating, etc.) within a data mart. The financial analysts turn their attention to analyzing the business rather than crunching numbers. Through that analysis, the profitability attributes can be identified and ultimately impact the organization’s performance.

Solution Components

The Rolta profitability solutions are delivered through several channels depending on the requirements of the situation. These multi-tier solutions are designed to handle anywhere from small and mid-size organizations to large enterprise class deployments consisting of hundreds of users. The major components consist of the ETL function, database layer, application layer and web layer that provides for easy access for reporting and ad hoc analysis.

Implementation

Rolta’s implementations consists of sound systems development lifecycle methodologies supported by IT and business expertise. This blend of knowledge is a characteristic of Rolta consultants that enable solution delivery where data and IT standards are combined with business profitability functionality. The result is a deployment that satisfies users needs while promoting common data and business rule definitions of the organization.

How Does it Fit and Why is it Different?

“Let business people analyze the business and let IT delivery the technology solutions that enable this analysis.” Rolta’s profitability solutions support this axiom by satisfying both the business and IT requirements. Analysts and management are provided with a system built according to how they manage the business and IT is able to deliver these capabilities while adhering to standards and with resource constraints that are a reality of today’s business climate. In the end, the organization is enabling better management and performance through the use of information that wasn’t otherwise available.