Practical frameworks and deep-dives on pricing, procurement, inventory, and operations analytics, written for the teams who actually run these numbers.
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18 published · More comingPVM analysis separates every revenue or margin change into three forces: price, volume, and product mix. Here is what each component means, how the data flows from your ERP, and a worked manufacturing example.
Gross margin moved. Was it price, volume, product mix, materials, labor, or burden? Each driver has a different fix. The six-driver bridge framework, including discounts, tariffs, and why customer mix and product mix are not the same problem.
Before you trust a price-volume-mix bridge, five data problems routinely corrupt the inputs: unmastered customers, item code discontinuity, unit price outliers, inconsistent cost layers, and multi-ERP period misalignment. How each breaks the bridge and how IQ Insights detects each one.
Margin erosion is rarely one thing. It is material cost creeping up, burden rising as volumes dip, and a volume slope quietly discounting your best accounts. Here is how to see all of it at once.
Real-time PPV alerts, demonstrated lead time, supplier scorecarding, AI contract capture, and IQ Insights monitoring. All of it from ERP data your team already has.
Your ERP reports 45 days of inventory on hand. Somewhere in your warehouse, there are bearings with 700 days of supply three aisles from a control relay four days from a stockout. Here is the SKU-level framework that changes every inventory decision you make.
Your ERP captures every transaction. It almost never surfaces the seven cross-entity, cross-module reports your CFO needs to run the business. Here is what those reports are and how to get them.
Three plants, three ERPs, no common data layer, and a board expecting operational visibility inside 100 days. How to get there without touching a single ERP.
I spent years as a certified Tableau trainer during the self-service analytics movement. I believed in it completely. Here's what I actually learned from the training room, and why AI changes the picture in a way that drag-and-drop never could.
Gross margin by product line, price realization, working capital, customer margin ranking, and one version of the numbers. The five questions — and what ERP data actually answers them.
The star schema underneath Inventory IQ. Why InventoryTransactionFact and ItemPlanningDim together answer 80% of the questions a buyer or planner asks every single day, across any ERP.
Fifteen years of watching the same broken workarounds. The ACME Inc problem, structural duplication across ERPs, and why the right answer is neither a spreadsheet nor a multi-year MDM project.
Your ERP groups overdue invoices into 30-day buckets. Those totals do not show customer concentration risk, DSO trends, or which invoices need a collections call today. Here is the AR analytics framework that actually shortens collection cycles.
Plant A is 4 days from a stockout. Plant B holds 140 days of the same part under a different item code. Neither ERP surfaces the transfer opportunity. Here is how multi-site inventory analytics closes that gap.
The standard (beginning + ending) / 2 formula produces distorted turns whenever you receive a large shipment near a period end. Here is the daily average method that eliminates calendar accidents and actually measures velocity.
Your ERP reports inventory value. It does not report how long that inventory has been sitting. Five aging buckets, three ways to define age, and the action framework that converts a slow-mover list into a working capital recovery plan.
Days on hand, turns, and aging buckets are only as reliable as the data they run on. UoM mismatches, negative balances, ghost inventory, location gaps, and stale standard cost — five problems that silently corrupt every metric your team uses to manage working capital.
You walked into Costco for a TV and left with nothing because you didn't know what you needed. Businesses do the same thing with data. Here is why buying an industry-aligned platform beats building, and why the right division of labor actually works.
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