An overall alignment between new products created and the financial reporting need to demonstrate the business value and benefits.
The report catalogue was reduced from 8,000 reports to 150 core reports managed by a newly appointed governance reporting team made up of key senior financial analysts.
While the time savings continued to improve post the completion of the project, the last measure improvement, 2 weeks post project delivery was 800 hours of time-savings across the overall Financial Reporting Team.
The client is a national Telecommunications provider, building and operating telecommunications networks. Their services include voice communications, mobile, internet access, pay television to name a few. The company operates predominantly in Australia and employs approximately 29,770 people.
Following an extensive organisational feasibility and profitability assessment, several efficiency gains opportunities were identified. One of the areas identified for improvement was the financial reporting landscape which serviced the Organisation’s core financial reporting needs. These reports were used to form key leadership financial decisions, reported to external regulators and auditors, and were provided to Board and shareholder members.
Due to a lack of reporting governance, the core reporting catalogue had grown from 120 to over 8,000 reports without clear verification if reports were all required in their existing state or at all. The catalogue drew on significant and highly needed storage capacity systems attributing to licensing costs, maintenance costs, support teams. It also caused senior & experienced reporting analysts to carry out mundane time-consuming error -fixing tasks, taking away from their value to the organisation.
The reporting team had extended from a team of approximately 10 and grew to 38 nationally plus a vendor-managed offshore team exceeding 15 staff.
The legacy systems supporting the reporting catalogue were becoming heavily strained and was increasingly experiencing system faults and failures.
Having already rolled out a Business Analytics Data warehouse for the client, they trusted the expertise of PWP to deliver the quality of service and customer support the client had come to rely on. As with the Data Warehousing project, there would be extensive staff disruptions and threat to business as usual functions.
The overall change would also have an impact on staff roles as some roles would need to be reassessed and re-directed to perform a report analytics function while others took on a governance role. This would require training, a new set of knowledge, an increase in accountability and acceptance of the change.
In partnership with the corporate change management and executive leadership team, PWP ran information session workshops to communicate the upcoming change to impacted staff. Additionally, the delivery team facilitated risk workshops involving executive leadership teams, sponsors, impacted team representatives and key stakeholders. Each risk was mitigated and, in some cases, accepted under management. The project team worked heavily with the key customer, being the Finance Reporting Team, to assess each report and classify in accordance to business impact against an agreed set of criteria.
The change and development team worked closely with impacted stakeholders to create richer and more fit-for-purpose reports. Several tasks were automated, saving approximately 3-4 hours of processing time and 2-3 hours of staff effort to consolidate and validate a single report.
The report catalogue was reduced from 8,000 reports to 150 core reports managed by a newly appointed governance reporting team made up of key senior financial analysts. A reporting development team was created to amend and create new key reports in collaboration with the governance team. Some staff were assigned to work with project teams to ensure the necessary financial reporting considerations were built into the project solution. This result led to an overall alignment between new products created and the financial reporting need to demonstrate the business value and benefits. While the time savings continued to improve post the completion of the project, the last measure improvement, 2 weeks post project delivery was 800 hours of time-savings across the overall Financial Reporting Team.
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