Make the Most of Magnitude Angles, Your ERP & Process Management
Magnitude Angles provides actionable insights for your business when undertaking business change or digital transformation projects. Magnitude Angles value-added services help you maximize value from Angles, your ERP, and process management in general.
Implementation Services
Making the decision to implement Angles in your ERP infrastructure – and the process of doing so – can be daunting tasks. Our team of experienced consultants are on hand to help you ensure the decision process and implementation are smooth and error-free.
Our team of ERP, process, and management experts deliver continuous program support including:
Proof of Value
In this short engagement we install and connect Angles to your ERP system, extract the data and then use a workshop type approach to build the analytics and reports your business needs. We highlight areas where data is incorrect, inventory is being wasted, excess costs incurred and service unnecessarily compromised.
This enables the joint creation of both a high-level business case and a series of defined reports ready for delivery in a senior management presentation.
- Installation and configuration on your server
- Linked to your ERP system
- Data is Extracted
- Use cases are developed and business case established
- Final presentation to management, business and IT
New ERP Implementation
Implementing a new ERP system? We can help ensure your implementation is smooth and error free.
We'll work with you on the project planning, data management, activity control and go-live. Our consultants understand how SAP and Oracle ERPs are structured, where the integration points lie and how to manage processes, from Procure-to-Pay to Human Resource Management, making them invaluable advisors to companies looking to implement these systems.
We use Angles to provide your business with a full suite of operational and management analytics and reporting you'll need to realize not just the benefit of your ERP investment, but new levels of insight and intelligence that will enable your company to improve profitability from day one.
Program Management
To ensure that our customers get the most value out of using Angles, we do much more than just sell licenses. We need to create the case for change, and then implement it. To do this, the team will work with you to identify where the business is currently struggling due to lack of insight, and how Angles can resolve these issues. And we ensure that these new analytics are embedded in the organization so that the potential savings from reducing waste, eliminating wasted effort, resources and money are realized.
To achieve the identification of issues and waste, Business Value Assessment workshops are organized that looks across numerous business processes and organizational elements. During these workshops the use cases for Angles are identified.
To financially quantify the potential benefits of using Angles, a Business Value Calculator (BVC) is used. This identifies the volume and financial cost of value-impacting behaviors such as time spent downloading data into Excel and manipulating it, in order to identify the potential savings that could be made if those behaviors could be eliminated through the use of Angles. The output of the BVC is an interactive discussion with internal process experts to ensure that there is consensus on the outcome.
You will now have a financially validated case for change, and a suite of use cases where Angle can improve the business. This forms a desired future state. The next step is to move beyond documentation into delivery.
"Quick win" use cases are delivered as part of the start-up project, so business leaders can see for themselves how quickly Angles can start to deliver value. The remaining use cases will then be documented in an Embedding Plan, which will be used by an Embedding Steering Committee to ensure that the improvements are achieved and the maximum value out of Angles is obtained.
Application Services
Making the decision to implement Angles in your ERP infrastructure is a transformative step. Our team of experienced consultants are on hand to help you ensure the decision process and implementation are smooth and error-free.
While typically included in our initial implementation, we also offer Application Services separately. This is helpful, for example, when you’re expanding the use of Angles throughout the organization. Leverage these services for:
Training
Magnitude offers a full curriculum of training courses for different topics and different target markets. These courses can be held at customer site or at Magnitude facilities.
Viewing User Training
This program provides a step-by-step overview on how to navigate through the Angles system and how to create and run reports, analytics and dashboards.
Power User Training
Power User Training provides participants with a solid understanding of the Angles system, its principles and possibilities. The participants will gain hands-on experience with Angles, and acquire the confidence to freely work within the system. Participants are expected to have solid prior knowledge of SAP Business Suite or Oracle Business Applications, and relevant business area expertise.
FI/CO Power User Training
This training will prepare participants with the skills to improve FI/CO related performance by uncovering gaps in processes, data pollution and unbilled or unclaimed documents. It will also demonstrate how to translate business questions from users into solutions quickly and easily using Angles.
SCM Training
Functional Certification Training is for users who want to extend their knowledge of Angles in the area of Supply Chain Management beyond Power User training. It is specifically designed to provide additional insight into the Supply Chain processes and how the advanced Supply Chain functionality of Angles provides capabilities not available in your ERP or any other analytical tool on the market.
Governance & Control
One of the key benefits of Angles is that it empowers business users to quickly create their own analysis without having to rely on IT. Once created, this analysis or report can be shared with colleagues – which is a very powerful benefit, but one that comes with great responsibilities.
It is important to have reports validated before they are shared with a broader audience, so that you can ensure that viewing users access validated Angles and quickly find all relevant information they are looking for. You also want to ensure that users are not running outdated versions of Angles in the shared Angle section.
So, how can you prevent that empowerment leads to an uncontrolled jungle with an ever increasing number of Angles? This can be prevented and controlled with some simple, easy to apply governance procedures, which is what this service package provides.
Based on your specific situation and best practices from our customers, we will advise you how to set-up the governance procedures compliant with existing procedures in your organization. This includes naming conventions, archiving, user maintenance, security profiles and governance guidelines. Finally, a governance implementation plan will be produced.
User Management
User Management is typically a customer task, performed by a named Application Manager.
This Angles Application manager is responsible for defining and setting the profiles for the business users and maintaining user groups and users in such a way that the customer's end-users can work in accordance with the required authorizations.
If the customer does not have a dedicated Application Manager, Magnitude can fulfill this role and provide a dedicated representative who will undertake these tasks and responsibilities.
Custom Configuration
Angles is delivered with pre-built, ready-to-use content and out-of-the-box configuration. This content and configuration automatically covers the scope of functionality and table that are available in standard SAP.
However, many customers have added a number of bespoke elements to their ERP installation, such as creating customer-specific tables, customer specific fields or customer specific calculations. Obviously, Magnitude does not know about these elements and needs to accommodate them as well as the standard elements. This is also necessary if customers need to include data from non-ERP data sources.
In cases as these, it will require customer specific configuration, which, of course, can be provided by Magnitude. However, unlike other reporting tools which would not be able to handle the bespoke nature of these developments, Angles can be adapted to include them in only a matter of days.
Report Creation
Angles is built on the philosophy of business user self-service, making reporting and analysis so simple that business users can do it with minimal IT support.
Angles calls every report or analysis an "Angle". Business users can run these "Angles" themselves and gain access to the information and operational analyses they need to take action on a day-to-day basis.
However, many users do not know what they don’t know, or they are after a complicated piece of cross-process analysis but are not sure how to get it. In these situations, it is often beneficial and quicker for the customer to describe what they are looking for, and for someone more experienced to produce the angle for them.
Magnitude provides an Angle / Report creation service for our customers. Depending on the complexity of the analysis or possible customer specific configuration, our consultants can help with the creation and validation of these more specific and complicated Angles or reports.
IT Services
Angles is a powerful tool in helping to ensure successful SAP and Oracle go-lives, rollouts, and upgrades. We support your business by helping identify and remediate issues during your ERP rollout or upgrade, as well as check the health of your ERP system’s data.
Our team can use Angles to rapidly develop KPI dashboards that show management what is going on in the business before and after go-live, with insights that enable the business to highlight and resolve any bottlenecks.
ERP Functional Check
After the dust has settled from your ERP go-live, you may start to notice that the wonderful benefits that you expected to gain have failed to materialize.
What you may find is that the benefits of process integration has been compromised by incorrectly maintained master data, combined with overdue and incorrect transactional data. This combination can severely the ability of the planning capabilities of SAP or Oracle and cause a variety of inefficiencies in the daily execution of your business processes. Users start to seek and find workarounds, download data for out-of-ERP processing and the situation aggravates further.
If this sounds like your business, and you’d like to understand the scale and financial implication of the issue, where the problems lie and what steps to take to resolve it, then an ERP functional health check is just what you need.
The ERP Functional Check from Magnitude can investigate one or many different process areas, including:
- Supply Chain
- Procurement
- Plant Maintenance
- Manufacturing
- Inventory Management
- Master Data Management
- Finance
- HCM
At the end of the health-check a detailed report is provided containing not only a list of found issues, but also action steps to resolve them.
KPI Dashboards
Your ERP is your single source of truth, but how can you get all the relevant data out of it in a consistent manner? Even in the smallest companies you will find Excel dashboards or PowerPoint presentations where data is aggregated and presented in an appealing manner. Other IT landscapes include BW and dashboard solutions like Antivia, QlikView and Tableau.
However, before these dashboard solutions show anything, they need to be fed with data. Normally this is extracted directly from the ERP. At this point companies face the complexity of the ERP’s database structure. As a result, something seemingly simple as a delivery performance dashboard suddenly becomes a huge and complex project taking months until completion.
Although the majority of your relevant data is stored in your ERP system in a structured way and is therefore in theory accessible for in-depth analytical processing, neither your ERP system nor your enterprise data warehouse can cater for these requirements. The complex data structure that is developed in order to provide the flexibility and “configurability” of a transactional system unfortunately prevents the creation of operational business analytics directly in that system.
Providing an analytical view of the data in your ERP is very different from providing a transaction processing view of the data. BI solutions that extract and transform data from multiple systems can be very powerful at reporting on past information and providing historical performance analysis in order to create a series of lag-based KPIs. Thus they are very suitable for corporate business intelligence.
However, they are also bound to the dimensions and values that have been selected during the design of the infocubes, reducing both their flexibility and the needed level of granularity.
By removing the complexity of ERP data, Angles not only provides Operational Business Analytics but can also significantly reduce the lead time and costs of feeding the Corporate BI system with relevant data.
Approach
Angles built-in process knowledge allows you to construct a dashboard of key performance indicators by easily designing, adjusting and verifying them in a process known as rapid prototyping.