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?
- Simplification: Two new reports replacing approximately 15 reports in the legacy applications. [any ideas of cost savings?]
- 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.
- Improved Performance as sample testing shows that the reports deliver around a 50% improvement in performance when compared to the legacy applications.
- 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.
- 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