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Cost Centre Transaction Reporting Process Improvement

The Situation

The Finance Transformation Programme of a multi-national pharmaceutical organisation realised it would not be able to decommission two legacy applications, and therefore miss their cost-saving objectives, because a number of key reports, used by 300+ users worldwide, were not within the scope of the project.

The Task

  • Create new reports in order to retire the legacy applications
  • Simplify and speed up the business process.
  • Deliver reports and improvements before the conclusion the main Finance Management Reporting transformation workstream.

The Action / Approach

  • Held a series of workshops that addressed requirements.
  • Specified two new transactional reports to replace the 15 legacy reports. Report overviews:
    • Cost Report Key Info: A report with a set of standard fields which will be regularly incorporated into management packs such as the cost centre manager report or project management reports.
    • Cost Report All Info: A report that includes all available fields. Uses extensive filter criteria so users can pull data for specific needs.
  • Use agile techniques and processes to accelerate delivery.

The Result

 

Can you put numbers on any of the other bullets?

  1. Simplification: Two new reports replacing approximately 15 reports in the legacy applications. [any ideas of cost savings?]
  2. Near real-time reporting from when the data is entered/modified in the source SAP System. This results in users receiving the data 1 day earlier in the month-end process.
  3. Improved Performance as sample testing shows that the reports deliver around a 50% improvement in performance when compared to the legacy applications.
  4. Greater use of SAP functionality. The solution makes use of technology to access data from a single location that was previously accessed from the individual regional SAP systems.
  5. Enabler for the  retirement of the legacy applications post-delivery of the full Management Reporting solution

Using agile techniques the project was delivered in under 6 months, 3 months ahead of the required date. [did this result in a cost saving to the client, as in, reducing the project budget by over £XXXX.xx.]

Focus In On: Responsible for Finance / CFO

New Areas of Value:

Improved Forecasting / Predictive Insights / Budgeting

Quality, speed and savings from optimisation and automation of finance processes

Best in class cost and service efficiency

Fast access to reliable data to enable front-line decision making

Rapid adoption of new technologies

Enhanced ability to drive financial returns, cashflow and sustainability

Improvements around:

Inefficient or non-standard processes

Arguing over data quality instead of supporting data driven decisions

Unable to produce accurate timely reports

Relevant Skills

Relevant Business Perspectives

Practice