• Profit Improvement Whitepapers

• Acorn goes beyond conventional ABC, with our unique methodology and patent pending technology we uniquely deliver next generation Activity Based Costing and Enterprise Profit Solutions that significantly reduce costs and increase profits for our customers.

• Consumer Products
  Distribution
  Financial Services
  General Profit Improvement
  Manufacturing
  Retail
  

• Consumer Products

• CPG Companies Reduce Supply Chain Costs and Everyone Wins
• Jack Haedicke, Arena CG
• To remain competitive in the grocery, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, retailers and wholesalers seek to offer more value to consumers. The most successful merchants provide quality goods at low prices by removing costs from the supply chain. Leading manufacturers have responded by implementing trading practices that benefit the retailer as well as themselves.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Distribution

• A Profit Improvement Roadmap for Distributors
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• What are leading distribution companies doing to improve their bottom line profits? During the past ten years, Acorn Systems1 has worked with over one hundred distribution companies in more than ten industry segments. While we would like to claim that all of these projects were universal successes, the fact is that some achieved more impact than others. What separates companies who achieved superior profit improvement from those who did not? The actions they took to improve profitability, based on the right insight.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Should Distributors Practice Their ABCs?
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• A step-by-step paper that details why a distributor should turn to ABC, how these costs would be uniquely calculated and how the information should be used to improve results.
• » Read Whitepaper

• A Better Easier Way to Improve Warehouse Operations
• Steven Anderson, Acorn Systems
• Ten industry leading case studies examine how organizations can improve warehouse operations through resource based costing.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Financial Services

• Profit Improvement Roadmap for Financial Service Companies
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• What are leading financial service companies doing to improve their profits? A lot. This industry has become a poster child for enacting change. Given the huge volumes of transactions, the competency of their staffs, and their massive investments in information systems, financial services companies are capable of making change, and are poised to reap tremendous rewards.
• » Read Whitepaper

• A Profit Improvement Roadmap for Retail Banking
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• The good news for retail banks is that they have a strong ability to get detailed cost, profit, and capacity information across their entire company. Advances in database technology, transaction systems, and activity-based costing have made it possible to do this quickly and painlessly. Banks we have worked with have done this in a matter of weeks. They leverage existing retail banking time-driven ABC templates to fast-track building their enterprise-wide ABC model. The journey just got a whole lot shorter.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Beyond Lean Six Sigma:
  Driving Sustainable Results in Financial Service
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• This white paper is a must read for any company in the financial industry considering implementing Lean Six Sigma. It could help you dramatically improve your success.
• » Read Whitepaper

• General Profit Improvement

• Profit-based Pricing Laying the Foundation for Your Pricing Strategy
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• Companies today can select from several different complex approaches to price strategy. Some perform price waterfall analyses, others create intricate price matrices, and still others optimize revenue by using advanced mathematics. However, the reality is that most distributors rely on Cost Plus to set pricing. When tasked to improve margins, these distributors ask, “Is our plus enough?”
• » Read Whitepaper

• Using Business Performance Management to Create Value
• Larry Maisel, Adjunct Professor, Columbia University
• IT fi nancial management adds signifi cantly more value to the organization when it enables IT strategy execution and drives better operational decision-making instead of simply tracking expenses and balancing the budget. Larry presents the benefits of a closed-loop business performance management system that helps the IT financial management team achieve this goal.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Moving from Single Product Profitability to Market Baskets
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• Taking a holistic view of the performance of a product is more than just looking at its revenue and profitability across the enterprise. In this leading-edge paper we examine how to analyze the profitability of market baskets.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Profit Management in a High Transaction Volume Environment
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• Growing the business through more branches, more stores, more students, and more planes increases revenue and the likelihood of survival. But this comes at a price. All of this new business increases complexity. High transaction volume companies have been forced to decide between two unacceptable trade-offs: (1) take an aggregate view; or (2) create separate spreadsheets / models for each location. Fortunately, there is now another option. With Time-Driven ABC, Companies no longer have to dumb down their analysis. They can now build massive, enterprise-wide models that incorporate all departments and processes.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Product Profitability: How to Perfect SKU Rationalization
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• Better product management is not just about getting the right products to the right customers profitably. It is also about making sure you don’t have what you don’t need. Optimizing your product mix becomes increasingly complex in a world of fast development cycles, short product lives, diverse customer segments, a myriad of channels, and intense global competition. As a first step, your organization needs to understand where it is making money.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Acquiring Profit Opportunities: Rethinking M&A
• By Steven R. Anderson and Kevin Prokop
• If you could achieve a 5x increase in profits without adding a dime in revenue, you would laugh all the way to the bank.
• » Read Whitepaper

• IT Value Management
• By Steven R. Anderson and Lawrence S. Maisel
• A better understanding of the value of IT drives smarter demand for services, better management of costs, and better utilization of IT resources. Learn how several leading companies are deploying a new framework that aligns their strategies with their technology assets and abilities to plan, measure, and manage operational performance with complete transparency and financial integrity.
• » Read Whitepaper

• How complex does your performance measurement system need to be?
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• Performance Measurement is a critical component to any successful Corporate Performance Management initiative. Over the years, there has been a lot of talk about the complexity of models developed to support these initiatives. In this paper, implementers of the new Time Driven approach describe four types of complexity that can exist in model implementations, how to minimize them and what an optimal
  solution looks like.
• » Read Whitepaper

• A Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measure Customer Profitability
• By Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Article
• Customer profitability metrics provide a link, otherwise missing, between customer success and improved financial performance. In this article, professor and Balanced Scorecard guru Robert S. Kaplan introduces BSC Customer Profitability Metrics. From Balanced Scorecard Report.
• » Read Whitepaper

• SOX + ABC = Value
• Mitchell Max, The Performax group
• The alignment of two seemingly unrelated stars in the Finance universe is creating a new opportunity for CFOs. Recently, companies have invested heavily in documenting and strengthening controls over business processes to support improved risk management in accordance with requirements such as Sarbanes - Oxley (and, for financial services organizations, Basel II), or to support process initiatives such as Six Sigma. At the same time, a new and innovative approach to developing accurate and meaningful cost information - Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing, has been evolving which directly leverages process documentation, dramatically reducing implementation time and cost.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Building the Profit Focused Supply Chain: A Game Plan for Capturing Real Value
• Steven R. Anderson and Leland Putterman
• Profit Focused Supply Chain Management allows high level visibility into supply chain performance and enables a company to take a much more granular approach to its supply chain and analyze the inefficient process links that drive the interaction and costs with its supply chain partners. Supply chain partners who have implemented Profit Focused Supply Chains can share not only their cost metrics (e.g. cost per drop) along process links (e.g. Delivery-Receiving), but also their process models. This allows them to understand how events are driving time spent and resource consumption by each company throughout its process links. Identifying these core process triggers in the supply chain can help align supply chain partners toward capturing enormous profit improvement.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing
• Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School Steven R. Anderson, Acorn Systems
• This provocative new whitepaper uses concrete examples to demonstrate how managers can obtain meaningful cost and profitability information, quickly and inexpensively
• » Read Whitepaper

• Drive Growth with Customer Profitability Management
• Dr. Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School and Steve Anderson, Acorn Systems
• This innovative new whitepaper outlines how Time-Driven Activity Based Costing delivers on the promise of ABC to help companies improve their bottom line.
• » Read Whitepaper

• He Who Has It On Paper Wins
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• How to maximize your ROI from Profit Management
• » Read Whitepaper

• Apply Customer Value Analytics to Boost Your Stock Price
• James Singer, Stern Stewart and Richard Drobner, Acorn Systems
• Learn how creating an information infrastructure that supports the timely and continuous analysis of customer value can have a dramatic impact on your organizations bottom line.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Customer Profitability Measurement and Management
• Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and V. G. Narayanan, Harvard Business School
• This whitepaper examines how companies can substantially increase profits by precisely measuring customer profitability and analyzing customer-specific profit information to identify and grow their most profitable customers, implement business changes that increase the profit contribution of their average-performing customers, and improve the profit of the worst-performing segments.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Activity Based Costing - Modified Approach
• Dr. Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School
• A ground-breaking white paper that discusses the necessity of measuring costs and therefore profitability based the cost of time. This leads to accuracy in cost tracking as well as measuring resource capacity excesses and constraints.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Full Life Cycle SKU Rationalization
• Bill Kadlec, Regional Vice President Acorn Systems
• With SKU Rationalization more important than ever, elimination of unprofitable SKUs and improvement of marginally performing SKUs is just one objective of SKU Rationalization initiatives. This white paper examines SKU rationalization and the channel, capacity, cost to serve, packaging and strategy components involved in optimizing a company's product and SKU portfolio.
• » Read Whitepaper

• New Approach to IT Charge-back
• Steven Anderson and Leslie Haight, Acorn Systems
• This white paper discusses how an effective IT Chargeback system has the functionality and capability to achieve key business goals.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Sarbanes Oxley Act Compliance
• Torsten Weirich, EVP of Product Development, Acorn Systems
• This whitepaper illustrates how companies can satisfy three key requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, Sections 404 and 409. Companies can leverage the solutions outlined in this paper to turn a regulatory cost into a business gain that generates more value over time.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Changing the Way Companies Measure and Manage
• Leland Putterman, CEO Acorn Systems
• An insightful paper that discusses the best way to scale an organization profitably — by delegating decision-making to each level of the business.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Removing the Blinders
• Currid and Company
• An eye opening paper that highlights the variances between activity-based costing (ABC) solutions and the Acorn solution. Customer case studies and ROI is also discussed.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Manufacturing

• Different Initiatives, Same Goal: How Retailers and CPG Manufacturers
  Can Reduce Net Landed Costs to Consumers
• By Jack Haedicke
• The hot business initiatives for today’s retailers and CPG manufacturers may differ but they all share a common goal: reducing net landed cost to the consumer. Learn how these often isolated supply chain and marketing initiatives can and should be linked through activity-based costing for maximum impact.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Retail

• Optimizing Store Labor in Retail
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• we believe that store labor is variable, and critical to focus on. Whenever there are retail departments with more than one employee, the retailer can flex staff levels in proportion to store activity. In other words, these multi-person departments can be construed as variable. This is exactly what Wal-Mart is trying to do. By tracking the number of customers within the store, it could quickly adjust staff levels on an hourly basis.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Profit Management in a High Transaction Volume Environment: Retail
• Steve Anderson, Founder Acorn Systems
• Growing the business through more stores increases revenue and the likelihood of survival. But this comes at a price. All of this new business increases complexity. High transaction volume companies have been forced to decide between two unacceptable trade-offs: (1) take an aggregate view; or (2) create separate spreadsheets / models for each location. Fortunately, there is now another option. With Time-Driven ABC, Companies no longer have to dumb down their analysis. They can now build massive, enterprise-wide models that incorporate all departments and processes.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Different Initiatives, Same Goal: How Retailers and CPG Manufacturers
  Can Reduce Net Landed Costs to Consumers
• By Jack Haedicke
• The hot business initiatives for today’s retailers and CPG manufacturers may differ but they all share a common goal: reducing net landed cost to the consumer. Learn how these often isolated supply chain and marketing initiatives can and should be linked through activity-based costing for maximum impact.
• » Read Whitepaper

• Full Life Cycle SKU Rationalization For Retail
• By Bill Kadlec, Acorn Systems
• Historically, companies have lacked the structured, detail level information necessary to carry out comprehensive SKU Rationalization programs. In general, systems have not been able to scale to provide accurate SKU and customer or channel profitability numbers on more than a one time basis, so organizations have not been able to systematically validate the information on an ongoing basis. Additionally, sufficient detail to explain "how" and "why" specific SKUs were unprofitable or marginal has been hard to come by. Finally, companies colid not provide an environment to continuously monitor and assess rationalization decisions cost effectively.
• » Read Whitepaper

 
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