Financial Budgeting Platform Allows Changes and Analysis in Online Mode

The management team found it difficult to get the online information about planned and actual financial results with all of the necessary detail—financial results analysis, prediction business development, and what-if-analysis—for managerial decision making.

In order to provide planned financial results to management, the finance department collects data from the department managers using Excel templates. Then, the information is uploaded into corporate OLAP cubes. Since the cubes can only be processed once a day, the information was often not available for analysis until the following day. If enough information was not provided or if changes needed to be made, the process starts over. For example, a finance department manager returns to the Excel template and changes input parameters, analyzes and manually includes dependencies between related or dependent parameters. Once complete, the excel template is uploaded to the cube again, and the process starts over. The information for analysis will not be available until the next day.

Project Description

The CIS finance team wor ked with SoftServe’s finance department to find a solution that gives users the ability to change and analyze activities in an online mode. Specifically, the solution should:

• Permit users to change one parameter, detect all dependencies, and recalculate results
• Integrate easily with other SoftServe systems
• Allow results modelling and be available from any location

Additionally, the solution should permit data analysis similar to the existing OLAP cubes.

With more than 100 users interested in tracking actual and planned results, the CIS finance team worked with SoftServe to survey end users to understand the requirements of the end users. From there, the team pulled together a list of requirements for the platform.

Next, the team completed a market analysis and defined the most appropriate platforms.

The platform list was prepared in two phases:

Phase 1

Detect platforms that meet general requirements (based on user experience and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI and analytics platforms)

Phase 2

Survey results and meetings with vendors to define the top five platforms

Value Delivered

Upon completion of the vendor selection process, the client was able to analyze the results and select the most appropriate platform, which provided the following value:

• Time for the annual budgeting process decreased from 3 months to 3 weeks
• Quality of data predictions increased by 30%
• Scalability of the budgeting process across different locations
• Higher degree of self-service and decision making
• Decrease support works by 50%