Wesley Mission budgets with IBM Cognos TM1.

Wesley Mission budgets with IBM Cognos TM1.

In 2004, Wesley Mission Sydney celebrated a remarkable 192 years of care to the disadvantaged. It is one of Australia's oldest social welfare organisations and is the country's largest Christian complex. Today the Mission conducts 45 worship services weekly, an extensive Pastoral Ministry, ethnic ministries, 250 weekly fellowship groups, and an extensive national television, radio, audio visual, print, and video ministry. It conducts more than 400 different programs of care and support, including hospitals, aged care services, disability support, homeless accommodation, addiction support and treatment and employment assistance just to name a few.

CASE STUDY

Wesley Mission Case Study 2

The Challenge The Solution Results

Wesley Mission's caring services have continued to grow over the past decade with revenue and net assets increasing on average by 23% per annum. These services are delivered by a professional team of over 3100 staff and 3400 volunteers. With about 60% of revenue coming from government funding, corporate sponsorships and individual donations, the organisation understands the critical nature of strong financial management.

In 2002 Wesley Mission recognized that its existing financial system was not keeping pace with the organisation's growing demands. According to Martin Gardiner, Wesley Mission's Group Manager - Financial and Commercial Services, "We run in excess of 300 cost centres and while we could produce standard financial reports, extracting ad hoc information was cumbersome. For example, there was a lot of re-keying required to produce the monthly board and ad hoc management reports. "

Budgeting was a particular headache, with the Mission having developed and modified its own system over the years. As pressure on the system increased, performance and reliability issues started to appear. Gardiner and the IT Department began investigating alternatives. As a charitable organisation Wesley Mission has to carefully consider any purchases. It has to be prudent in its choices, and cost is always an important concern. Yet at the same time, the Mission understands the need to be professional in its choice of tools.

Gardiner continues, "We reviewed a number of different products that were possible solutions and ended up with IBM Cognos TM1 as our front contender. I had used it before and knew it was relatively easy to model with and to maintain. Plus we believed it would have a lower wholeof-life cost to the organisation."

The Mission's initial focus was to build a new budget systemso they created a TM1 balance sheet, and income and expenditure cubes that were linked to the Peoplesoft financial system. Once this was up and running, the next step was to reconcile payroll information to the general ledger, so that accurate detail could be obtained about staff hours and costs across over 110 locations operated by the organisation.

Gardiner's group significantly expanded the first TM1 budget system, simplifying the way that payroll data was input so that the system became much faster for remote users, at the same time as expanding the budget development capability to produce more accurate payroll budgets. Using the combination of IBM Cognos TM1 and the SPF Plus software, Gardiner and his parttime IT staff person have replaced over 25 separate budget files with about 10 files, that can still provide the detailed drill-down and analysis of each and every income and expenditure category in the budget. Plus it delivers reconciled, detailed payroll, income and expenditure budget reports. Payroll budgeting is now a very precise process which better meets the needs of the 13 different industries that Wesley Mission operates within. To make the

Wesley Mission Case Study 3

"Essentially TM1 has enabled us o extract financial data simply. We can now manipulate it and report on it with relative ease, whereas previously it would take hours of work to just get the information. It has sped up our analysis and decision making; reduced re-keying; and we can now look at data in

multiple combinations relatively easily. The other good thing, is that you don't need to be an IT person to extract the information."

financial information available to remote branches, the Mission chose a Citrix thin-client platform.

Gardiner commented, "In the early days we had experienced a number of performance problems using the Web to distribute and access budget information. Many of our offices rely on dial-up and ADSL connections and it was just taking too long for files to load. The thin-client set-up solved this." Results The end result is a TM1-based budget system that is fast and reliable, and much more detailed than was previously available.

"Essentially TM1 has enabled us to extract financial data simply. We can now manipulate it and report on it with relative ease, whereas previously it would take hours of work to just get the information. It has sped up our analysis and decision making; reduced re-keying; and we can now look at data in multiple combinations relatively easily.

"The other good thing," added Gardiner, "is that you don't need to be an IT person to extract the information. Once you set the system up, it is very easy to use. I particularly like the fact that you can quickly develop financial reports without relying on any IT involvement."

The Future

The future Wesley Mission is now working on a detailed reporting system that will replace the way it currently disseminates income and expenditure reports. The new system incorporates a range of payroll, income and expenditure reports, and will eventually include assets as well. With IBM Cognos TM1 as the engine, Microsoft Excel as the interface, and again running on the Citrix platform, the reporting system is due to be rolled out in early 2005.

About Cubewise

Cubewise is a premium IBM Cognos partner with over 100 implementations of IBM Cognos across the globe. Cubewise has taken it's years of combined IBM Cognos TM1 and Group Finance know-how and produced the IGFIS (Integrated Group Finance Information System) solution, which represents a powerful, high ROI finance tool to any mid market company, especially those that thought such professional tools were only the domain of the largest organizations.

About IBM Cognos TM1

IBM Cognos TM1 is a high performance cube-based database and modeling solution that is unmatched in it's flexibility, scalability and multi-user collaborative ability which has become the cornerstone of IBM's Performance Management solution strategy.

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