Technology

Posted on December 5, 2017 by staff

Council saves 300 days on budget setting using data

Technology

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has saved the equivalent of over 300 person days on its budget setting and monitoring process by successfully implementing a Financial Workforce Planning Solution from MHR Analytics.

The cost savings have helped the Council report overall savings of 2,000 days from its wider use of business analytics as part of a concerted effort to free up staff to focus on more value-added activities.

MHR Analytics is a specialist provider of business intelligence and analytics solutions, helping organisations to make sense of disparate raw data, identify insight and make intelligent decisions.

Richard Douthwaite, systems finance manager at Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, said: “Our reason for implementing Financial Workforce Planning was to modernise and streamline our budget setting process, particularly around staff budgeting, which was labour intensive and heavily reliant on spreadsheets.

“The project also acted as a catalyst for change in terms of modernising and re-engineering our business processes.

“By adopting the new Financial Workforce Planning system we have built up accuracy, reliability and trustworthiness in our data.

“We’ve saved ourselves over 300 person days from budget setting alone and have achieved massive benefits in terms of data quality, on which evidence based decisions are now being taken – allowing us to make better use of resources available.

“We are also now able to easily incorporate scenario planning into our financial processes with regards to living wage and NI rate changes.”

The Financial Workforce Planning solution has eliminated inconsistent processes and introduced a fully integrated, single source for all of the council’s budget and forecasting needs.

The solution has helped the council streamline its finance processes and say goodbye to multiple Excel spreadsheets.

Since implementation, significant process efficiencies have allowed the finance team to focus on management information requests and quicker, more accurate, scenario planning.