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The Department of Internal Affairs sought innovation to transform BAU and to rise above the status quo of financial reporting.
The Department of Internal Affairs sought innovation to transform BAU and to rise above the status quo of financial reporting.
“The financial processes of government are extremely complex,” Greg Simpson, Manager of Financial Planning and Performance at the Department of Internal Affairs advised Fronde, “The Department of Internal Affairs [DIA] is no exception.” DIA delivers a very diverse range of services to the New Zealand public - everything from birth certificates to censorship, passports to local government, and gaming controls to ethnic communities.
DIA must complete financial planning and reporting across its entire portfolio of divergent services. Data must be collected, collated, validated and then information sets and reports need to be generated for six different government Ministers, all of whom require different sets of information presented in different formats at different times.
Managing this process with multiple sets of spreadsheets was a long and complex activity. Separate spreadsheets had to be sent to all departments. All of the submitted data had to be reviewed, verified and collated before being loaded into the central database. Annual budgeting required two to three months to complete and month end processing usually took ten to eleven working days.
After discussions and advice from Fronde, DIA elected to implement Adaptive Insights as a short term solution (for approximately 20 users) while a larger business intelligence application was readied and rolled out. It quickly became apparent that Adaptive Insights was an excellent tool for the job. It was decided that Adaptive Insights would be retained and would be rolled out by Fronde to a greater number of users (about 200).
Adaptive Insights has cut the annual budgeting process time from two to three months down to one month. Month end processing has been reduced from ten to eleven working days down to five, with reports generally available on the second working day of the month. Managers can use this data to make decisions in the current month. The results and outcomes of those decisions can be seen at the start of the next month.
At the push of a button Deputy Chief Executives across the organisation receive dashboard data that is relevant to them. Rapid, straightforward collection, collation and processing of the financial data.
Adaptive Insights has provided a much greater level of agility within the team. Users can develop and share their own reports. Prior to the implementation of Adaptive Insights users had to specify a new report and then have the report developed by IT. With Adaptive Insights,users can prototype reports for themselves. If the prototype does not meet the business need after one to two days of development it can be deleted and a new report created.
“Consumers of the data are able to make better and more timely business decisions. The approach has changed from, ‘this data doesn’t look right’to ‘what does this data mean for the business?’. The result is better understanding of budgeting information and better use of budgets.”
According to Greg, Adaptive Insights has allowed DIA to “standardise, simplify and centralise”a very complex component of its business."
*These case studies are from our archives. Exact publish dates are not known.
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