Industry Type: Government – R&D | Planning and Budgeting Solution for a Research and Development Institute
The Institute’s mission is to be the globally preferred source of through research by passionate people dedicated to Singapore’s economic success. The Institute performs R&D in information, communications and media (ICM) technologies to develop holistic solutions across the ICM value chain.
The Problem
The Solution:
Implementation of a centralized budgeting solution based on Hyperion Suite of EPM products that would stream line the budgeting procedure and help the finance department to budget and forecast their expenses as well as help the Human resource department in maintaining the headcount salary calculation, calculating leave encashment rate etc. The main area of focus for the Project was the Operational Expenses calculation for the organization. Different dimensions related to business logic were created such as Institute, Grades, Accounts, Period, Funding, and Versions. Institute was further broken into Departments and Cost Centre and different levels of grades were listed under the Grade dimension. Funding was subdivided into external and self/internal components while other dimensions used were standard dimensions.
Business rules were written for calculations involved in the budgeting. These Business rule facilitated the driver based planning that would take a predefined set of rate such as taxes, bonus rates etc and perform expense budgeting in accordance to the rates and the budgeted figures entered into the application via Web forms made available to users via Planning web forms. The Actuals where pulled in from the SAP which was loaded into planning and facilitated variance calculations where the budgeted figures are compared with the actual figures. The data resided in a centralized Hyperion Essbase repository which facilitated multidimensional analysis, adhoc analysis via Excel, Detailed analysis via static and dynamic reports made in Hyperion Financial Reports and Excel.
Key Benefits
Business Value & ROI:
The users spend more time on Analysis rather than calculations which they used to do earlier. This saves them considerable amount of time on complex calculations. More précised level of output is available which also helps in more realistic and practical output figures, hence a more reliable Budget can be prepared.
The Institute’s mission is to be the globally preferred source of through research by passionate people dedicated to Singapore’s economic success. The Institute performs R&D in information, communications and media (ICM) technologies to develop holistic solutions across the ICM value chain.
The Problem
- Decentralized Planning and budgeting done through Ms Excel and Hyperion Essbase.
- Traditional system of data input and output through Excel resulting in erroneous data entry.
- Lack of built in security for data integrity.
- Time consuming offline calculations involved
- Unavailability of various Drafts/Versions of the Budgets across a single interface.
- No Predefined Workflow/Process Management to promote the planning unit draft for review across hierarchies.
The Solution:
Implementation of a centralized budgeting solution based on Hyperion Suite of EPM products that would stream line the budgeting procedure and help the finance department to budget and forecast their expenses as well as help the Human resource department in maintaining the headcount salary calculation, calculating leave encashment rate etc. The main area of focus for the Project was the Operational Expenses calculation for the organization. Different dimensions related to business logic were created such as Institute, Grades, Accounts, Period, Funding, and Versions. Institute was further broken into Departments and Cost Centre and different levels of grades were listed under the Grade dimension. Funding was subdivided into external and self/internal components while other dimensions used were standard dimensions.
Business rules were written for calculations involved in the budgeting. These Business rule facilitated the driver based planning that would take a predefined set of rate such as taxes, bonus rates etc and perform expense budgeting in accordance to the rates and the budgeted figures entered into the application via Web forms made available to users via Planning web forms. The Actuals where pulled in from the SAP which was loaded into planning and facilitated variance calculations where the budgeted figures are compared with the actual figures. The data resided in a centralized Hyperion Essbase repository which facilitated multidimensional analysis, adhoc analysis via Excel, Detailed analysis via static and dynamic reports made in Hyperion Financial Reports and Excel.
Key Benefits
- Multidimensional analysis
- Standardized and centralized Budgeting and planning application.
- Forecasting and Projection facility across multiple years.
- Availability of various Drafts of the budget in the same application.
- Variance analysis across various drafts of Budgets
- Workflow consisting of various states to promote the drafted budget to higher subordinates which can be tracked at any point of time.
- Authenticated access to application.
- Detailed analysis via Static and Dynamic reports.
Business Value & ROI:
The users spend more time on Analysis rather than calculations which they used to do earlier. This saves them considerable amount of time on complex calculations. More précised level of output is available which also helps in more realistic and practical output figures, hence a more reliable Budget can be prepared.