Throughout the pandemic, food and beverage companies have weathered surges in demand, rapid fluctuations in consumer buying habits, and the complexities of the global supply chain. Without complete enterprise-wide visibility or collaboration, shifting gears and adapting to trends in the market can seem insurmountable.

How can you modernize to keep pace with the speed of consumer needs in today’s competitive market? We recently did a webinar with Mark Winter, CFO of My Food Bag, to hear how his company, a leading online meal kit provider in New Zealand, managed to improve business productivity, efficiently manage the growth of its business and navigate the pressures of the pandemic.

Here are some valuable takeaways from the webinar. Watch the on-demand recording if you want to hear more about how My Food Bag deals with special requests from customers for particular food products, or ingredients, how the company manages last-mile delivery, and what they do to get the right balance between supply chain efficiency and sustainability.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) bring numerous challenges across all departments. But IT teams are often charged with providing the underlying infrastructure that will allow the organizations to operate successfully under a new configuration. This is a big ask and typically occurs with little warning, and regardless of how much ongoing work exists in the day job.

There are plenty of factors that can further complicate this scenario, including when the company is acquired or merged is in a different country with unique reporting and regulatory requirements. While part of an important growth strategy for the organization, these moves can put tremendous pressure on already taxed IT staff.

Even when you do everything right, the unexpected can happen. Natural disasters strike, equipment fails, and human errors occurs. While steps were taken to mitigate risk, when disaster strikes, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back online are taken correctly, and time is never on your side.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different through today’s lens. This week, we focus on critical system failure and how unexpected outages can bring a company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

Losses can be initially staggering and ultimately far-reaching, impacting not only revenue and productivity but also long-term brand value. It’s been estimated that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, with $140,000 per hour on the low end and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end. Absorbing the activities to resolve the issue itself and then putting in place actions across the organization to recover from the critical failure and its consequences can derail an organization for an extended period of time.

For many organizations, the realization that your go-to people, those who truly understand all the nuances in your enterprise ecosystem, are no longer there comes too late. Whether this loss comes through resignation, retirement, health issues, or merger and acquisition, you will need to find replacements. How can your organization ensure the continuity of day-to-day operations with the potential loss of technical expertise?

One of the ways to mitigate this risk is to accelerate cloud migration.   

Many clients have shared with me that in today's challenging times, they need to focus on their core business and not worry about running IT systems. What would happen if your IT experts are no longer available? 

Are you reducing idle cash while reducing risks?

Today, financial services organizations are more focused on what’s necessary to safeguard business continuity and solvency. Much of this begins with greater visibility and reliability of key data to help drive your critical business decisions, especially during critical market changes.

Our current blog series is reviewing cash and treasury best practices you can follow to prepare for instant payment changes and build true cash visibility. Last week we looked at understanding the impact of instant payments. In part two this week, we focus on generating cash positioning.

Consideration #2: Generate cash positioning

To satisfy both operational and regulatory requirements, financial services organizations need operating models for cash and liquidity management. To achieve and maintain this capability successfully, organizations need to focus on gaining greater visibility into their cash and liquidity.

Download the eBook
Cash and treasury: Prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility

Today, financial services organizations are more focused on what’s necessary to safeguard business continuity and solvency. Much of this begins with greater visibility and reliability of key data to help drive your critical business decisions, especially during critical market changes.

Whether you call it faster payments, immediate payments, instant payments, or fast money, real-time payments technology has gained a solid foothold in the payment processing world.

Additionally, to satisfy both operational and regulatory requirements, you need operating models for cash and liquidity management. To successfully achieve and maintain this capability organizations need to focus on gaining greater visibility into their cash and liquidity.

Download the eBook
Cash and treasury: Prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility

We have compiled a blog series that will focus on cash and treasury best practices you can follow to prepare for significant changes with instant payments and build true cash visibility. This week, we focus on the first consideration: understanding the impact of instant payments.

State governments want their software to be secure, compliant and designed for the 21^st century. As such, many state governments are evaluating their current ERP platforms to determine how to modernize financials, procurement, human capital management, and payroll applications.

While some have pursued modernization by embarking on multi-tenant cloud journeys, most organizations are still in the planning phase.

They are moving in the right direction, though, as multi-tenant cloud SaaS software ensures applications are continually enhanced without the need for a multi-million-dollar, multi-year project. Multi-tenant cloud software also protects limited resources from overwhelming or menial tasks such as:

• Babysitting servers
• Applying and testing an endless number of patches
• Performing backups
• Managing disaster recovery

The evolution of supply chain business models has been accelerated by unprecedented disruptions. As a result, there has been a clear shift from analog supply chains models of the past into a trajectory towards a digitalized ecosystem. These new business models recognize and necessitate the move to a digital and integrated supply chain that provides visibility and ease of use for consumers.

This journey is about moving towards a world where all parties participating across your network are connected to a single version of the truth. Supply chain thinking is shifting from ‘linear supply chains’ to ‘supply chain eco-systems’ propelled and supported by digital technologies.

Gartner has established a five-stage model of the journey to supply chain maturity, ranging from manual, analog systems to a fully digitalized ecosystem. Key differentiators along this evolutionary chain include consideration of data and collaboration, with the ultimate goal of integrating data across multiple systems to achieve a fully connected ecosystem that provides transparency and visibility for your company both internally and externally.

Stability is important. Hotels, casinos, and resorts have guests they need to serve right now, today. Hospitality software solutions in place help them do that by taking care of the basics: reservations, check-ins, folios and check-outs, along with a staggering variety of in-house services and their associated charges. Essential software like hotel PMS is pretty “sticky” that way; it’s easier to stick to what you’ve got than it is to change. Why fix what isn’t broken?

Here’s the thing. Five years from now – perhaps sooner – the way guests engage with hospitality providers will likely look very different. Innovative solutions and platforms will be necessary to scale to that new paradigm, whatever it may be. So how do hospitality organizations know when it’s time to start planning for that? How do decision-makers know when it’s time to get unstuck? Here are 3 considerations to help answer that question.

As new hospitality technology emerges and as organizations increasingly invest in it, the ways people do their jobs change in response. Most of the time, this means greater efficiency, and a way for teams to concentrate on key tasks while the technology takes care of the necessary minutiae. Some of the time though, the rise of certain technologies can cause some concerns that with certain functionality in place, the human factor will get lost.

Hospitality AI functionality in hotel revenue management and in hotel pricing tools is a case in point. The conversation around automation via algorithms has been too easily positioned with a “versus” between machine learning solutions and professional expertise. Yet, the features of the technology and years of knowledge and experience held by revenue and strategy teams isn’t adversarial. The relationship between them is more about achieving greater focus and clarity. How do science-based algorithms in revenue management and pricing solutions help your organization do that? Let’s look at some key points.