Business Intelligence Case Study

- Local Government Body

Key Business Requirement

Most local bodies have to immerse themselves for hours in long, laborious planning processes. This needs to be balanced with planning and management of short term goals. The business need is for business intelligence applications that can provide this flexibility for both long and short term objectives.

Individual plans are built up from labour costs/resources and additional costs. The ability to distinguish these plans in certain categories including, capital new, capital renewal and operating programmes is an important requirement for management.

A solution was required to provide an output planning and reporting (OPR) system to meet these changing requirements

Reporting was required to deliver information in a meaningful way allowing management to make key business decisions.

Business Benefit

With the improved planning process, the model developed allowed collaboration from across the organisation, these changes automatically consolidate, providing the financial statements - (10-year horizon) required by the council.

Results are reflected the instant a change is made to an operational budget line. This allowed for a turnaround of one day between a budget approval gateway to the information being at the printers.

Using this information, the model automatically calculates the rates for the city on an annual basis. New plans can be created literally ‘on the fly’ . Forecast rate increases were now visible well before previously possible.

Valuable time is no longer wasted balancing MS Excel spreadsheets and collating data.

Existing Data Infrastructure

ERP database, with data exported to Excel for collation and report development.

Solution

Considered

A rigorous process of evaluating potential suppliers was completed.

Accepted

OLAP TMI was chosen due to its capability to budget and plan for both operational and capital programmes. The chosen application supports a baseline model, with budget managers able to select and deselect individual programs of work, and instantly see the impact over a period up to 10 years.

Solution Delivered

Data

• Information was captured at both a program level and also at individual jobs within a program.
• Actual costs and revenue are extracted and loaded from the ‘Corporate Vision’ ERP system, providing for real time comparison of budget versus actual.
• Structure changes are automatically reflected minimising maintenance.

Visualisation

• Enhanced planning functionality, incuding real time, interactive statements and reports:

  • Statement of financial performance
  • Statement of position
  • Statement of cashflows
• Users have a simple, easy-to-use interface to capture their information. With the enhanced security in TM1, planning managers only see the information that relates to their area of the business.

Planned Next Step

Planned future development of TM1 in the organisation includes the roll-out of the application online, enabling a wider audience to gain the benefits of a system that is easy to use and cost-efficient.

Others applications are currently under review to include asset valuation and performance reporting.

Business Feedback

CFO stated "TM1 has become part of the corporate toolset, not just budgeting and reporting. In addition to the budget model, we have developed a model to show impact of changing rating basis".

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