SpendVue
Spend cycle control
Protecting shareholder value through Revenue & Spend Management.
Overstep
Intrusion management
The big intrusion. Businesses and organisations are reimagining and reshaping the landscape of work.
Governor Insight
Visionary governance
A technology dashboard helping to improve children’s education through enhanced data utility.
SpendVue
SpendVue helps organisations to raise awarenes of spend cycle control and:
Maximise its revenues to absorb cost
Increase the efficiency of how resources are deployed and utilised
Reduce the risk of losses and liabilities through inaccurate billing and payments
Reduce the amount it spends on resources
Careful management of financial resources is central to organisational success and growth
It is not uncommon for organisations to engrain processes and mechanisms that are logical yet inherently weak, and in their own way effectively contribute to and perpetuate poor spend management practice.
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Our Spend Management and Revenue Tracking tool, SpendVue, is designed to expose hidden weaknesses in cost and revenue management, and help close off the gaps through which Shareholder Value leaks away. The approach is simple. Our tool focuses on spend management. It assesses the potential recovery of spend through revenue, and the practical legitimacy of the spend from the moment it is triggered.
By working as far upstream as possible in the spend cycle, SpendVue tests the various points at which spend is allowed and where operational flow is reliant on purchased resources. Spend Vue draws its effectiveness and potency from the preconception that ‘until proven otherwise,
it is prudent to assume that management of spend is flawed’. Our Spend Vue assessors utilise the tool to systematically track the flow of spend through its key underpinning processes.
The output is an aggregated ‘likelihood for leakage’ against a ‘total sum spent’. This objectively guides the business leader to those areas that would benefit from more focussed attention.
SpendVue reveals how well:
• Cost is absorbed through conversion to revenue
• Spend is considered before it is committed
• Approval gateways work
• Resources are utilised once purchased
• Resources are reconciled to invoices and payments
In turn, the benefits of our approach become clear for organisations as they quickly and easily assess the magnitude of financial impact and act to stop losses.
1. That everyone understands what they are doing, and the impact of their decisions
2. That in any chain of approval, each person acts judiciously
3. That as an absorber of cost, revenue entitlements are fully captured
4. That resourcing volumes and inputs are conditionally fixed in some way
5. That if invoices follow a regular trend, then they’re probably correct
SpendVue provides us with an objective mechanism to highlight some of the ways in which people can make valuable contribution to their customers and employers. In our experience this helps create:
• A greater degree of understanding of their role in the context of the organisation they work for
• A greater sense of worth as a creator and contributor of recognised value
• A greater feeling of fulfillment by working diligently on aspects of their role that they were previously not aware of
OverStep
Preventing Intrusion
Caring for your people means to care for their families too
Why care?
Good health and wellbeing is a great measure of balance. It is the subtlety of being able to moderate all areas of your life in such a way that no single area dominates at the expense of another. A healthy diet, hydration, exercise, rest, play and sleep are all associated with health & wellbeing, and there is no reason why work can’t either. Yet all too often, work is the thing that we struggle to balance and now is the time to consider a different approach …
How will the most socially conscious organisations respond when it becomes clear that greater shareholder value is being leveraged from the homes of its people?
Businesses and organisations are reimagining and reshaping the landscape of work. As the dust settles on the pandemic, organisations are looking to a future that offers greater flexibility for their people, and if done in the right way, will mark a progressive socio-economic shift.
Above all else, homes are sanctuaries for people. They are places where families come together to live, to relax, to grow and share their experiences of life. It is with the greatest care and respect that organisations should consider intruding upon the sanctuary of it’s people in pursuit of shareholder value. Without it, organisational culture could evolve to a point where it recognises people’s homes as a proxy to their corporate estate, yet one where the debt of ownership rests with the employee.
In the modern service economy, never to this extent have sales, earnings and free cash flow been accessed using ‘domestic real estate’, and this poses some ethical questions:
- What changes are being made to Values, Strategic Priorities, Structures and Growth objectives to support this transition?
- How are organisations assessing the potential impact for employees working from home or in a hybrid capacity?
- How are organisations supporting employees to manage the impacts of home or hybrid working?
- How are companies providing more sophisticated support over transactional support?
The potential for intrusion is different for everyone and the reason for that is because everyone is different. People respond to the conditions of the environment in which they find themselves. Our responses are generated to influence or achieve a preferred outcome and begin from a defined starting point. That starting point is “what we believe to be happening” or “what we believe to be true”.
The trust and empowerment culture of the organisation
The successful shift to home and hybrid working will come about through the strength of the organisation’s trust and empowerment culture. People will need to feel a genuine shift in the extent to which their employers grant and encourage autonomy. Yet until they do, people will make excessive sacrifices to show that trust and empowerment are not being taken for granted.
The maturity of the systems through which we validate our contribution
Some organisations are more competitive than others, and individuals are no different. Competition can certainly be healthy, yet in organisations where tangible mechanisms to demonstrate worth are scarce, people will go way above and beyond to prove themselves. This shows up through excessive hours of focus dedicated to work and results.
The culture of competitiveness
Organisational systems provide objective methods to validate effort. They come in many forms – from the recognition of hours at work, through to meeting objectives.
When organisational systems do not act as an effective mechanism for people to validate their contribution, they will find other ways to do it, and this often means excessive sacrifices, which can lead to reduced employee psychological health
The rigidity of working practices
Presenteeism has been a long-standing working practice that helps individuals to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to work, and there are many others too. When there is a lack of effective balance in the rigidity of working practices, people and organisations can overcompensate in other ways to validate this commitment. The shift to home and hybrid working has removed or overstated a number of fixed working practices that people will either compensate for or be further burdened by.
Organisational systems provide objective methods to validate effort. They come in many forms – from the recognition of hours at work, through to meeting objectives. When organisational systems do not act as an effective mechanism for people to validate their contribution, they will find other ways to do it, and this often means excessive sacrifices, which can lead to reduced employee psychological health.
The OverStep Model
The Over Step Model (right) allows employees to assess their perceptions of 4 organisational dimensions. This understanding is correlated to ‘the feeling of intrusion upon them’, whether that be at home or the office. Subjective perception is the most important factor, as this will drive a person’s belief system, which in turn drives their behaviour. It is their behavioural response that drives the problem.
In reality, very few organisations set out to intrude upon the lives and homes of their people, yet it doesn’t feel like that when a portion of the home is now dedicated to work. Work has a different energy and a different feel about it. People adopt a different persona. People detach. People are different in this space.
In reality, very few organisations set out to intrude upon the lives and homes of their people, yet it doesn’t feel like that when a portion of the home is now dedicated to work. Work has a different energy and a different feel about it. People adopt a different persona. People detach. People are different in this space.
Our model does three things:
- It assesses employee perceptions
- It raises personal awareness to behaviour
- It provides a basis from which to explore effective, tailored and healthier strategies to manage the perceptive impact of intrusion
Approaching intrusion is an expression of care and respect for employees and their families and expressing this level of care and respect fosters loyalty and creates healthy commitment and also:
- Improves productivity
- Promotes enjoyment through work
- Positively impacts stress, absenteeism and churn
- Provides an inclusive mechanism for how intrusion is considered
- Actively demonstrates what it means to be a responsible business
Governor Insight
A tool for effective school governance
Governor Insight offers:
- Efficient & consistent data export, input and publication
- Essential data can be generated in seconds and at the touch of a button, removing the pain of data exports from pre-existing systems.
- Clear, simple and interpretable presentation can be achieved instantly eliminating copious reports containing a myriad of tables, graphs and charts.
- Gives hours back to school leaders by reducing the workload burden of headteachers as well as the time and cost of school administration.
- Ensures data accuracy and efficiency by avoiding erroneous, manual data entry.
- Makes the task of data interpretation easier for Governors, enhancing their individuial and collective contribution.
- Reduces administrative and interpretive burden for such volunteer Governors, who often have busy day-jobs.
Governor Insight is a technology dashboard developed to assist school Governors who are striving to improve pupil outcomes
As one of the largest volunteering groups, Governors play a vital role in raising standards; essential to every school’s effectiveness. Key to the success of Governing Bodies is the supply of essential and easy-to-interpret data, necessary to inform governance decisions and drive better management.
But strong data analysis is a specialist area. It takes considerable time, effort and skill for schools to collate useful data-sets for meaningful interpretation and practical governance application. Even for the most experienced Governors and leadership teams, data must inform decision-making, both for the sake of the impact and the outcome.
Raising standards through clarity, the governor tool is improving pupil outcomes through responsible technology
Improved data utility and effective functionality offers:
- Visibility at a glance for term-by-term performance by school or cohort
- Tracked performance trends and performance ranking by cohort over time
- Flagging for areas of ‘most concern’ for targeted Governor monitoring activity
- Easy data access to Governors for their interrogation, consideration and enquiry of source information, at their leisure
- An established clear link between the school’s data, its monitoring activity and both development of, and adherence to the School’s SEF and SIP
- Greater objectivity through the function of Governance, allowingthe school’s data to fully inform decision making