Structured, Reliable & Connected Data

Consumer data are available in structured and unstructured forms from a number of data sources while corporate data are sitting in corporate databases and usually unshared externally. Many corporations have a large amount of electronic documents (e.g., contract documents, project plans and performance review forms) that are unstructured data. And their structured data can also be:

• Unreliable because of the lack of maker/checker mechanism and audit trail built-in when their data were generated and altered
• Unconnected because no integrated management vision when their application functions were created

Therefore, maximizing generating and maintaining structured, reliable and connected data are the low hanging fruits for data science for these corporations.

8Manage was designed to minimize generating non-structured data or maximizing generating and maintaining structured data for corporations via proper digitalization. It helps:

• Startups to be born digital
• Incumbent companies to be transformed to full digital
• Companies make use of agility & micro behavior statistics to compete in the new era

Maker-checker, Requester-approver or 4-Eyes is one of the central design principles for financial service software. According to WIKIPEDIA, the principle of maker and checker means that for each transaction, there must be at least two individuals necessary for its completion. While one individual may create a transaction, the other individual should be involved in confirmation/authorization of the same. Here the segregation of duties plays an important role. In this way, strict control is kept over system software and data, keeping in mind functional division of labor between all classes of employees.

In 8Manage’s interaction-is-transaction environment, everyone directly transacts (e.g., request, commit, deliver and acceptance) with the system and the system will automatically record and aggregate the information in real-time and also provide the audit trail for future reference. In a filling-in-the-form type of computerization such as MS Project, everyone manually enters the interaction information (e.g., request, commit, deliver and acceptance) to the system but information aggregation must be done manually and no audit trail information can be provided for future reference.

A filling-in-the-form type of computerization on the surface looks very similar to a transaction-oriented system, but the two types of systems actually are sky-and-floor different from an information reliability standpoint. The filling –in-the-form type of systems are 100% controlled by humans and information can be manipulated while the information is being entered and changed after it is entered and other people won’t be able to notice. If people know the fact that the management information is unreliable, when they have a choice of being honest to their disadvantage or being dishonest to their advantage, some would choose "dishonesty to their advantage".

Since keeping people honest is very key in management, 8Manage‘s interaction-is-transaction capability actually makes a sky-and-floor difference in management effectiveness.

When managing businesses, projects or operations, it is very key to be able to detect the impactful changes such as the following and control the negative effect in a systematic way and at the earliest possible time:

• Project deliverable is late and it will trigger penalty in Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Sales order changes affecting R&D, production, supply chain and finance

If each module was designed independently (without integrated management in mind), it is impossible to link them together using EAI and create an effective management system since the root in effective integrated management is the information model and changing each module information model is equivalent to rewriting all of them.

8Manage was designed with CRM, PPM, e-Procurement, O2O, HCM, Office Automation, Finance and Full Automation usage scenarios and integrated management in mind from day one. It is a single integrated information model for all different modules and these modules can be used separately as CRM, PPM, e-Procurement, O2O, HCM, Office Automation, Finance and Full Automation. Therefore, when a project deliverable is late, the penalty will be automatically reflected in the Profit & Loss of the associated contract according to the SLA and of course the appropriate alert message will be sent out to the relevant people. Similarly, the approved change of a sales order will automatically trigger updates in R&D, supply-chain and production plans and financial forecasts.

Old Approach 

A traditional data warehouse involves the data warehouse system development, data cleaning, data integration and data mining process.  The process is absolutely needed because traditional business systems are silos and they have different databases.  This process is not only time-consuming and costly, but requires putting the data warehouse and BI tools separate from the business (transactional) systems and making the embedded actions (e.g., automated actions after certain things are detected) difficult. 

8Manage’s Approach

8Manage provides a total solution on a single system and the 8Manage database is already the data warehouse for the business. 8Manage minimizes the need of data integration and provides industry specific pre-integrated solutions such as below:

For some businesses such as professional services and IT, there is no need to develop another data warehouse and 8Manage database can satisfy 100% of the requirements.  For retailed businesses, 8Manage will interface with its POS system.  For banking businesses, 8Manage will interface with its CIF.  

Most enterprises are at the lowest 2 levels of integrated management today and do not prepare themselves well for the new era. 8Manage would allow them to move up to the 3rd, 4th or 5th level of integrated management

When an enterprise reaches the 3rd level of integrated management, it would achieve the highest level of decision support and managerial efficiency for its business operations. When an enterprise reaches the 4th level, it would be able to make optimized decisions and achieve the highest level of business operations efficiency across its clients and business partners. When an enterprise reaches the 5th level, it would be able to collect micro behavior statistics of its employees, clients and business partners and use the data for deep learning for recognizing and predicting patterns and automatically selecting or devising methods for optimized results.