We Were Wrong About Who Was Profitable — and We Had the Data to Prove It
In 2003, I was part of Altam Global Intelligence — the consulting practice built on ALG Software's HyperABC platform. A global air express leader came to us with a spreadsheet that said their banking customers were unprofitable. The spreadsheet was wrong. Structurally, causally, dangerously wrong. Pedro San Martín of Asher & Company tells the story of how the CAM-I Cross, 106 activities, and a 16x faster implementation methodology inverted an entire customer profitability ranking — and why that same question drives every Decision-to-Value engagement we do today.
The Planning System That Had Nothing to Plan With
North America's largest home appliance manufacturer spent 30 months and USD 5.1 million building an EPM system that couldn't answer a single strategic question. The problem wasn't the technology — it was the sequence. SAP BPC came first. SAP PaPM came second. The cost model never came at all. Pedro San Martín of Asher & Company shows why building planning before costing is the most expensive mistake in enterprise performance management — and how Oracle EPM fixed it by starting where every model must start: with the cost.
The Pricing Lever Most CFOs Ignore: Why 1% Price Improvement Beats 5% Cost Reduction
A 1% price improvement generates 12.3% ROI improvement — nearly 5x the impact of cutting fixed costs. Yet fewer than 3% of companies manage pricing with the same rigor they apply to cost reduction. This article reveals why pricing is the largest blind spot on most P&Ls, and how connecting cost-to-serve data to your pricing waterfall changes everything.