March 2022
Solution Spotlight: Leading ERPs Can Do Even More with Advanced AI and Analytics
ERP Tip of the Month: 5 Best Practices to Speed Up Your Month-end Close
Meet the Team: Joseph (Jaye) H. Haggler
Leading ERPs Can Do Even More with Advanced AI and Analytics
As the future speeds toward us, it’s easy to miss the behind-the-scenes convergence of business processes, new technology, and computing power that many forward-thinking organizations are taking advantage of to execute mission critical objectives in smarter, faster and more accurate ways.
Innovative adopters from well-known international brands, federal agencies, state, and local public sector organizations all have a competitive edge, and it makes a difference. This edge can automate human resource functions; provide insight into employee or customer behavior; predict the probability of maintenance failure on a key piece of factory equipment; help assign critical resources to respond to a disaster; and much more.
How do they do it?
You might expect a long explanation, but it’s much simpler than that...
They invest in the latest Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Solutions and learn how to capitalize on these solutions’ capabilities.
The ERP marketplace has dramatically changed over the last few years. There is now a lower cost to operate and maintain Cloud-based products with intelligent tools based on the latest analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning advances.
Leading ERP Solutions:
Workday Prism Analytics
Part of Workday’s ERP, Workday Prism Analytics blends transactional and high-volume external operational data with advanced and intelligent data analysis tools. It allows users to manage, prepare, govern, trace, and publish data for reporting and analysis This provides actionable insight and information needed to make better, more informed decisions.
Get a full picture of your transactions — all in one system. Workday Prism Analytics allows users to analyze with unlimited operational dimensionality. Users can blend emergency response, asset and property management, survey, and other data from non-Workday systems with project, grant, funds, and revenue data to get full insight into cost and effort. This provides rich detail that is often dropped—or never included—when aggregating data for posting to your general ledger.
On a practical level, it can help answer questions like:
Which car rental, airlines and hotels make up the largest portion of our travel expenses?
Where are we exposed to potential misuse of expense and travel?
Who has access to conflicting business processes (for example, approving spend and selecting a vendor)?
How are emergency response call volumes and response time trending relative to cost, location, and head count?
Which assets are most expensive to maintain based on cost by asset type or location?
What areas have the most wasteful spend and why?
What is the energy use by cost and location?
Which departments are performing most favorably against budget?
Workday Prism Analytics can become a single source of data truth. Its automated and highly effective pattern-detection capabilities look for important changes that a person might miss, and its machine learning tools can help predict important data and insights.
SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
Key next generation SAP Intelligent Technologies include:
SAP Conversational AI - Deliver personalized human-like conversations at scale anytime, anywhere, and on any device with multilingual chatbots, and reduce development efforts and costs.
SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation - Reduce the presence of repetitive and manual activities. Systematize time-consuming, manual activities by developing bots that support error-free, scalable tasks and help you focus on high-value processes.
SAP Internet of Things - Increase operational efficiency and drive business outcomes by enhancing your business processes with IoT data and improve quality, productivity, and resource efficiency by applying intelligent technologies.
These solutions may sound expensive at first, but the chance of being left behind is a more expensive proposition. Many adopters of these solutions are surprised at their rapid payback and ROI, and they wonder how they did business before.
To learn more about the latest ERP Analytics and AI innovations, contact the Meridian Partners Team. We have been successfully helping commercial, government, and public sector organizations get ahead and stay ahead for the last two decades.
To learn more about the latest ERP Analytics and AI innovations, contact the Meridian Partners team. We have been successfully helping commercial, government, and public sector organizations get ahead and stay ahead for the last two decades.
5 Best Practices to Speed Up Your Month-end Close
Most organizations across market sector and industry have a monthly closing cycle. For many organizations, the closing process can be a painful and time-consuming process.
An inefficient month-end close process can be error prone or a costly use of resources and time. It can cause non-compliance with the delivery of financial statements and reports required by regulatory agencies. This can result in fines, audits, or public scrutiny.
Here are five tips to speed up your month-end close and make everything less painful:
1. Document and analyze the process
Creating and documenting a list of month-end steps, along with the how, who, when, and how long they take to be performed will provide insight into overburdened staff, duplicated efforts, inefficient steps, and much more. This helps identify training issues, steps that can be standardized or automated, duplicated efforts, redundant data inputs and data issues, as well as steps that don’t need to be completed or can be created earlier.
2. Automate and standardize
This step sounds simple, as most modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions include built-in functionality designed to help expedite the month-end close. The problem is that many organizations are not fully aware of what their ERP can do to help automate workflow and standardize the month-end close process.
3. Close what can be closed early
There are accounts that don’t change at the end of the month. Identify and close these early; this helps move workload to more efficient time periods within the monthly cycle and eliminate month-end chaos.
4. Clean up your chart of accounts
A well-organized and efficient chart of accounts should follow recommended accounting standards for an industry. Review your chart of accounts to ensure it follows best practices for your industry. Eliminating accounts that are not required or utilized helps minimize accounting errors and incorrect postings.
5. Move to the cloud
There are many new cloud-based ERP solutions from leading providers that help minimize or eliminate a desktop-based spreadsheet dependent process. This helps create an accurate, data-driven, single version of the truth. Spreadsheets can lead to manual entry, calculation, rollup, and rounding issues, and they can be especially problematic when the only person that knew where the spreadsheet was or how it worked leaves or retires.
To learn more about how you can speed up your month-end close, contact the Meridian Partners Team. We have been successfully helping commercial, government, and public sector organizations do just that for the last two decades.
Each month, we highlight a key team member making a difference for our customers. This month, we would like to recognize Joseph (Jaye) H. Haggler, Growth Officer, Government Solutions Group.
As the Growth Officer for the Government Solutions Group, Jaye Haggler is responsible for leading Meridian Partners’ dedicated government division.
As the division leader, he can often be found presenting innovative, cost effective, and reliable technology solutions to Meridian Partners’ many government customers, including the United States Army, United States Air Force, United States Coast Guard, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and AbilityOne.
Jaye is a proven business development and capture manager with over 20 years of proven senior operation management experience. He is an expert at providing direction and support in all aspects of solution lifecycle including identification, qualification, positioning, and for 8a / SDVOSB /SDBE / ANC both (Tribal, Alaskan Native, Hawaiian) entities.
He is best known for creating and executing strategies to help government agencies meet mission critical objectives on-time and on-budget. Skilled at leveraging division knowledge, and the efficient management of publicly funded resources to ensure a technically sound, correctly priced, solution that maximizes public benefit.
Outside of Meridian, Jaye has a strong love for the sport of basketball, which he has coached for over 20 years at every level from little league to Division I college basketball. He just finished his basketball season with a private high school in Northern Virginia. Jaye is finishing a degree in Bible studies from Colorado Christina University, graduating in December 2022. He is excited about Meridian’s success and looking forward to continued growth.
Meridian Partners is a minority owned company and SBA-certified 8(a) leader in providing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence, and Budgeting solutions. Meridian helps organizations maximize business processes to be more agile, efficient, and transparent through the optimization of their enterprise systems.