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Over a decade ago I started my professional career in the professional services industry. As an intern IT auditor in a large accounting firm I met a variety of clients, who each had their own business procedures, routines and challenges. Smaller to bigger, the core functions of a business organization are similar, especially when it comes to the finance departments and their operation.
Being an auditor, this wide common denominator between your clients allows you to establish your own routines and work in templates. On my first audit project I spent over 40 hours to complete the job (even though I was allocated only with 35 :)), but doing it repeatedly for other clients allowed me to become much more efficient and effective.
10 client projects later, doing exactly the same audit, I began wondering to myself: “why don’t we have an application that does exactly what I do but in a fraction of the time?!”. An application that can extract the relevant data from the client’s systems, ingest it, analyze it and conclude the audit, in a click of a button. After all, we are asking all clients to provide us with the same data, they all run on similar financial infrastructure and execute a very similar financial operation.
Since my days as a young intern, data processing and analysis technologies have made a huge leap. Businesses progressed as well but at a slower pace. I learned that in a later stage of my career as an Analytics consultant - Change management is extremely challenging, mainly when it involves complex operations that need a lot of data in order to function effectively and make good decisions.
I carried this feeling throughout my career. My passion was always to find a way to make a business be more effective and efficient by leveraging data and advanced technology.
Fast forward to today, equipped with a decade and a half of business and operations experience, I joined Unity SCM, and found out that (at least some of) my dreams have come true.
I was fortunate to join a few days after we engaged with a new customer and immediately tapped into the onboarding process. In many ways I was thrown back to my internship days - data requests, data quality and integrity issues, back and forth with the customer to better understand their operation and what decisions they were making.
After a few sessions, when I started to get the picture, it occurred to me that if I was still in the consulting business, this type of project, given all the customer’s needs and desires, would have taken at least three months with a team of 2-3 professionals.
I then realized that we are. a week into the implementation and we already share valuable deliverables with the client. This is where it hit me - an operation is an operation. If you understand its fundamentals, you understand the business context and access to the right tech and tools, harnessing your data to work for you is a relatively quick and easy task.
You must be wondering - so where is the gap? Well, I think this gap is dual - the business users don’t have access to the technology, while the more techy guys do not understand the business well enough.
Many of the recent year’s successful startups manage to bridge this gap and assist business organizations to improve performance and decision making - Unity SCM is no different. The highly contextualized and robust data model allows us to assist our customers in bridging the gap, connect their data, both from inside and outside the organization, and harness it for their day to day operation and decision making.
