CXO Cockpit
This module is designed for the senior management officials of the organization such as the board members, CXO positions and their direct reports, as the subject matters are positioned at the strategic level.
This module is more than a software. It is a heavy research-based output. The real challenge in this module is the variation of the contents what the CXOs want to see. Organization and industry wise change is shocking. However, it is our humble try to make sense of the information to the CXO positions.
CTrends Management Dashboard
CXO Dashboards for Functional Monthly Review (FMR)
In many deployments where IT applications are working smoothly, management still experiences a specific difficulty. The outputs produced by the systems
are not designed as suitable for the management level. Different CXO positions have different focus areas to monitor and control. The ERP systems are
not designed with CXO focus areas with monitoring dashboards. This system has CXO-specific dashboards in the following areas. More can be added during
the implementation.
- Board Executive Committee (BEC)
- Board Audit Committee (BAC)
- Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
- Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
- Chief Sales & Marketing Officer (CSMO)
- Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO)
- Chief Information Officer (CIO)
- Chief HR Officer (CHRO)
The Importance of Board and ManCom Meetings
As board members define business goals and strategies, it is crucial to document the board meetings (MoM) and time-bound action points. Similarly, the management
team (ManCom) disseminate those goals and strategies and align the organizational processes and functional goals to make sure that the business goals are achieved.
This module allows the meeting planning, invitations, MoM documentation and responsibility assignment, progress posting and reviews. Data confidentiality is
maintained.
CTrends Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM)
Enterprise Goals Cascade
The module allows to define the central business goals (coming from the board) as well as the functional goals to support the business goals.
- All the business functions are specified in the system in four domains of the balanced scorecard (BSC).
- The system comes with preconfigured 32 generic business goals from the iCMM framework of Innovative Minds Consulting Ltd. Additional goals can be added if needed.
- The functional goals are also specified with respect to each business goal. All the generic functional goals against the generic business goals are already configured in the system from the iCMM framework. Additional functional goals can also be configured.
Multi-year Milestone Planning
A generic goal is expressed in terms of some business metrics for the sake of quantified specification and measurement. There
are thousands of business metrics in the system, which are used for this purpose.
- Business goals can be specified over multiple years using predefined business metrics.
- Similarly, each function derives the goal metrics and assign them in their respective areas.
- This metric level cascade has to be correctly defined by the client. The system already has the meaningful generic goal level cascade.
Annual Operating Plan (AOP) Development
AOP is the documentation of strategic plans assuring that the functional goals will be achieved and ultimately the business goals.
- Every AOP activity is defined, target-assigned, person and timeline-assigned.
- Each AOP activity owner can also ask for supports from others using the RASCI principles.
- The budget is fit into the AOP in terms of activity wise targets.
AOP Progress Monitoring
All the AOP activities and support roles will appear in the personal dashboard of the responsible persons automatically.
- When the responsible persons post their activity / role progress, the AOP activity level dashboards are updated.
- In case of support roles (ASCI-roles), the activity owner has to explicitly accept the delivery in the system.
- In case of activity performance (R-role), the functional goal owner has to accept the achievement through reviews.
Goals Progress Monitoring
- The board members and ManCom members can see and monitor the status of each AOP activity, functional goal and central business goal.
- The AOP RASCI matrix will auto-generate and help the board and ManCom members to understand where the bottleneck is.
- The seniors can also see who is causing the failure if whom in case of inadequate supports.
- In case of functional goal achievement, the functional head (CXO) has to accept the achievement through reviews.
- In case of business goal achievement, the CEO has to accept the achievement through reviews or auditing.
Data visualization
The system has business function wise predesigned data visualization using the business metrics, which are readily usable by the client.
Those are all HTML5-based beautiful visualization models using well known open-source libraries such as D3.js and its derivatives.
Custom Dashboards
This module allows the implementation team to create new custom dashboards through configuration. However, that will be a little
technical. The backend data structure follows the star-schema model. Again, the data is organized in this module all using business metrics.
It is important to understand that the system has fixed knowledge of each metric's algorithm so that data is processed accurately and in
context.
CTrends Business Analytics (BI)
There are many BI applications for data analysis and visualization for obtaining the business insights. CTrends has taken a different approach to achieve the same goals. But it is a better organized way by using predefined standard business metrics as building blocks.
The Use of Business Metrics
A business metric is used in various scenarios such as business intelligence in this module, business and functional goals setting in the
SEM module, risk monitoring in terms of KRI, fraud detection in term of KFI, etc. Therefore, this system requires each business metric with
the following attributes to enable various process automation.
- Metric code, title, description, unit of measure, metric type, etc.
- Business object assignment, classification (function and group)
- Formula and guideline, etc.
Maintaining Composite Business Metrics
We can also create composite metrics consisting of simple metrics where we can also configure the presentation style. Composite metrics are
used to create data cards in a dashboard. It enables the client to maintain many custom dashboards within a short time.
User Profile wise Metrics Assignment
Every employee is created in the system against a predefined HR role. That role is used in various scenarios. The client can maintain access to
specific business metrics through the HR roles. Then, the employees assigned to those roles will see the small data cards appearing in the
system home page as the short-cut visualization of role-specific business information.
Transaction Data Transfer from External Systems using ETL
For those metrics of which the data is generated in this system, nothing needs to be done. But for data originating in other systems needs to
be transported in this system using an ETL tool. We customize and deploy this ETL tool for each client.