Acorn Observations

9 Observations on Profitability and Cost Management

pageObservations

Acorn has been doing this for a while now. Every client is at a different point, and has a different path, in their overall profitability and cost management journey. However, a few elements seem to be present time and time again. Below are 9 characteristics we typically find in client engagements. How many of them apply to your company? How might you do better? We welcome the chance to discuss and explore further – ultimately creating real and lasting value for your company.





  • At a minimum, 20-40% of our clients’ customers and products are losing them money. This is consistent over 100’s of successful implementations.
  • Most companies that become our clients were doing some level of profitability and cost analysis. The most common technology we see is excel and the most common allocation methodology is gross margin or something close to that.
  • We have replaced all of our major competitors and when we do, we find that the replaced systems were not very accurate, were not holistic, were not used by the organization for profit improvement.
  • Current systems are almost always siloed in the enterprise and rarely provide a cohesive/holistic view.
  • Maintaining the system(s) is problematic, requiring extensive resource and significant manual intervention
  • Most legacy system(s) are run quarterly at best
  • Results are not available to the business until 30+ days after prior financial close
  • Alternative solutions force clients to ‘keep it simple’ and to compromise accuracy, details or other information.
  • Results do not drive decisions or compensation