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A Little ESG Background

According to Gartner, an analyst firm, environmental sustainability will become a top-five strategic priority for at least 25% of CEOs by 2025, which is a lot higher than the less-than-five percent it has been over the past ten years.

If you work in the wholesale trade/distribution industry, life is probably very interesting right now. Even at the best of times, wholesale distributors face immense complexity, juggling large numbers of product SKUs, and managing massive volumes of transactions with both suppliers and customers. Layered onto all this are the intricacies of pricing and rebate structures, and competitive pressures driving value chain disruption and digital transformation.

There are myriad business reasons to cultivate an inclusive culture, and here are a few examples:

Few are more affected by supply chain disruptions than the distributors who make up the Wholesale Trade industry. As intermediaries between manufacturers and final customers, distributors add value in myriad ways including repackaging, inventory management, and logistics which means their businesses are especially impacted by factors like uncertain delivery times, struggling suppliers, and inflation.

Every company plans. Historically, corporate financial planning has been a predictable, sometimes painful, process that brought managers together to make decisions about future company direction and priorities, while also providing a benchmark against which to measure performance.

As investors focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, they are increasingly asking companies to provide information about their performance in these areas. ESG reporting is becoming an expectation of investors and will soon be an SEC regulatory requirement. Many companies have started tracking their ESG performance, but it can be a challenge to do so effectively. In this blog post, we will discuss the data aspect of ESG reporting, along with a solution!

In the two decades since QueBIT was founded, we have often been puzzled by the slow pace of change in enterprise planning and performance management. As recently as 2019 we attended a CFO symposium, only to be surprised at how the case study presentations around revenue and expense planning, headcount and capital planning, and variance and profitability analysis were little different from spreadsheet-centric presentations we had seen ten years before, and how few finance organizations had embraced technology to support data extraction, data governance and modeling their businesses.

Oracle and SAP have long dominated the market for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, the software companies use to run their businesses. Simply put, ERP software can manage all day-to-day business activities including accounting, procurement, invoicing, supply chain operations, workforce management and more. These days, having an ERP system to keep track of all these everyday business transactions represents a “bare minimum” technology investment for any company.

The busiest time of the year is right around the corner for many FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) professionals. Even though some organizations have moved towards continuous planning - typically rolling 12 – 18-month forecasts refreshed quarterly or even monthly – there is still a benefit to stopping and taking stock once a year.