I have regularly saved clients substantial unnecessary expenditure and improved profitability while in many cases improving competitive advantage.
Problem: Food manufacturing and distriubtion client (£1 billion) battling to deliver consolidated financial statements to the board on time
Action: Developed a universal Chart of Accounts that incorporated all companies in the Group and provided the framework for a Group Consolidation reporting solution
Resolution: Board report available in two weeks with greatly reduced effort and cost — much better quality management information in the new data warehouse — improved efficiency and profitability
“This letter serves to confirm that I have known Dr James Robertson for many years We met at a mutual client where my company was implementing a new ERP system. James joined the project at the invitation of the client to assist with his strategic approach to the implementation as well as perform a project management role. I consider this period, my biggest learning experience in terms of how to successfully implement an ERP system.
“My first reaction to the Dr Robertson’s approach was confusion and resistance, however after a short period of working on this initial project together and finally understanding his approach, particularly how it could substantially improve my company’s success rate, I bought in and imbedded his principles into my organisation. Since then I have applied his philosophies in the organisations I lead.
“Following the initial project we undertook with Dr Robertson our company applied his principles on new projects resulting in a far greater percentage of successful projects and customers who got what they expected.
“At all times I have found James to be reliable, hard-working and dedicated to ensuring that he achieves the results he promises. His engineering background supports the attention to detail he achieves in his projects and the logical approach to his work.
“I would recommend James to an organisation in need of a person who is extremely skilled at rescuing a failed project or assisting a company in need of improvement in order to make decisions which will ensure its future success or extract new value from the organisation.”
“Extraordinary ability to hone in on the critical success factors that create the foundation that ensure successful software implementations”
“I met James when we were at a particularly tricky state of negotiation with a very large requirement where we needed some very specific skills in developing a high level financial reporting system. We also needed to address Sarbanes Oxley reporting requirements with more comprehensive process and systems audit as an adjunct to the reporting framework. James brought considerable skills, skills we did not have in-house, in developing a comprehensive taxonomy for the management accounting recording and reporting for the client. It was a large and ultimately very successful engagement.
“As a result of this successful first project we continued to work closely with Dr James… He was always very generous in sharing knowledge as well as regularly bringing left field potential solutions to difficult and complex IT related problems.
“We, also as a business embraced his pioneering views on the nature of successful taxonomies and the crucial part they play in managing most if not all aspects of commercial enterprise. Subsequently we have used his best practice processes in many our large clients.”
“Dr Robertson is not only an excellent communicator / presenter but his innovative approach to a major IT reimplementation at |MoreGolf enabled management to streamline the business processes and systems across the diversified businesses in the group and the disparate systems which were in place. I strongly believe that this was made possible due to Dr Robertsons’s vast experience and knowledge. I personally had never before seen such an innovative approach to a project.. We were able to make improvements in areas of financial reporting in terms of more meaningful information being provided to the executive management team.”
“James advised SAP senior customer executives on their strategy regarding their Financial Systems and in particular the structure and approach to deriving value from their General Ledger. James is a global specialist in adoption and proper implementation of strategy and its integration into information technology projects.”
“I worked closely with Dr Robertson for 5 years and saw the benefits his work brought to his customers.”
Problem: Client (£20 million) import and distribution — over 20,000 accounts in the Chart of Accounts and difficulty reporting performance to overseas principals
Action: In new ERP developed highly structured Product Class and other validation tables enabling bespoke software to manage brand marketing
Resolution: Greatly improved efficiency and management information — secured Dior account with immediate 12% uplife in revenue
If you would like a no charge, no obligation Zoom call to discuss y our concerns and requirements please provide your details below:
I publish regular emails in which I discuss various matters relating to the strategic management of organizations including developing strategic plans and how to get maximum strategic value from corporate ERP, AI, CRM and other systems in order to enable clients to thrive and increase profitability I also assist with procurement of such systems as well as optimizing those systems.
If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please let me have the email address you want me to use in the form below:
The configuration of ERP and other high end business systems plays a major role in the success or failure of ERP and other business systems projects. The JAR&A precision configuration approach ensures a high value outcome:
1. Mainstream products are mature and configurable — all significant ERP systems today, as well as all other major business information systems, are extremely mature and highly configurable.
2. Configuration is critical — the benefit of this extreme level of configurability is that any significant commercial product can in large measure be configured for any organization. The downside is that if the configuration is weak or sub-optimal the ERP is difficult to use, inefficient and generally sub-standard – this is evidenced by the failure rate of ERP implementations which is currently running at around 75% according to Gartner and other authorities (search on Google for “ERP Failure Rate”).
3. Problems with reporting and analysis — one of the consequences of this situation is that reports are time consuming and difficult to produce and maintain, expenditure on personnel to extract and maintain reports and business intelligence dashboards and suchlike is excessive and frequently executives and managers cannot easily obtain answers to straightforward questions without time consuming restructuring of data. Export to Excel and then manual or semi-manual analysis is at epidemic levels in some organizations.
4. Experience and precision configuration — over the years, based on experience in zoology taxonomies, library systems, the NATO document classification scheme and other areas the Strategy Doctor has developed a very robust strategic approach to the Precision Configuration of ERP and other business information systems. This approach is discussed in detail on the second ERP Doctor website (email for the URL) this includes a number of white papers on the subject.
5. Improve efficiency and effectiveness of ERP — precision configuration improves the efficiency of ERP operation, dramatically improves the quality and accessibility of management information, provides “answers to the questions you have not yet thought to ask” and opens the door to clever pieces of bespoke software alongside the ERP that enable organizations to do things with their data that competitors are unable to do thereby opening the door to secure major new client contracts.
6. Unlock the full potential — in terms of unlocking the full potential of any ERP investment Precision Configuration is the most tangible long-term deliverable. Precision configuration can also be applied in the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) of Data Warehouses and BI tools in order to bring structure and order to the data in order to improve the precision and reliability of reporting and visualization.
Some examples:
We look forward to assisting your organization to achieve a high-value ERP implementation.
If you would like a no charge, no obligation Zoom call to discuss y our concerns and requirements please provide your details below:
I publish regular emails in which I discuss various matters relating to the strategic management of organizations including developing strategic plans and how to get maximum strategic value from corporate ERP, AI, CRM and other systems in order to enable clients to thrive and increase profitability I also assist with procurement of such systems as well as optimizing those systems.
If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please let me have the email address you want me to use in the form below: