Making Your Data Work for You

Issue: In today’s world of decentralized business operations, many organizations face data and performance metric challenges associated with multiple financial reporting systems/processes by each division or line of business. At the heart of the issue is a data reporting and aggregating methodology that is often based on Excel spreadsheets, or worse, from each division, line of business, or individual subsidiary that must be coalesced manually into one file for further manipulation and eventual review. The time consumed by the effort to consolidate data is extraordinarily high and manual aspect of aggregation presents risk to data integrity and quality. As such, the benefits associated with accurate and detailed performance metrics, sensitivity analysis of performance measures and metrics, and financial/performance forecasting are not being fully realized. This puts a high cost on data collection and management without a reasonable return.

Proposed Solution: ITo improve the overall data reporting capability of organizations, Kymber has developed BPR and data management solutions. We work with our clients to redefine financial reporting processes and establish a data warehouse to pull and store individual division/department financial data reports in one central location. This allows for regular daily/weekly/monthly data reporting removing the need for continuous data consolidation/manipulation. As the data is then stored in one location, a Business Intelligence solution could be implemented on top of the data warehouse to facilitate “canned” and “adhoc” reporting.

This approach requires some changes and updates to current business processes to implement the data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. However, these are normally fairly minimal as Kymber utilizes our proven BPR methodology that creates stakeholder buy-in at the very beginning. The benefit of insight gained by the improved performance reporting far outweighs the effort required to adjust re-engineer business processes. Also, since the actual reporting and business intelligence system can be semi-automated, actual work time will decline dramatically while performance reporting will increase. Organizations that have implemented similar solutions have saved over 5000 man-hours (2.5 full time equivalent) per year in analyst time.

The business intelligence dashboard solutions can vary from simplistic bullet charts depicted to the left.

Kymber can also design more impactful and detailed charts that allow for further “drill down” to better understand the contributing data as depicted below:

These types of process/business flow charts allow directors and executives to quickly understand where variances from forecast are occurring and the associated downstream impacts. Kymber recommends this type of initial approach to facilitate data reporting in a “quick win” format that will show immediate return for fiscal resource and time invested in project.

As the solution and underlying business processes take hold, Kymber recommends that data/performance reporting results be implemented to create more informative reporting dashboards that will provide more fidelity in information reporting to individual division/department executives in easily-digestible formats as examples displayed below:

This type of financial reporting snapshot allows for filtering on various reporting channels. Such a format could allow for filtering by individual practice or practice type. Expenses could be filtered by office type or equipment allowing for flexible reporting that is refreshed as the data is updated.

More detailed performance data dashboards can be created that incorporate forecasting and sensitivity analysis to allow for on-the-fly what-if analysis without modifying or adjusting any of the underlying data.

Kymber Solution Implementation: Utilizing our 5-step approach, we recommend a focused approach concentrating on the initial symptoms of inefficiency, inaccuracy, and workload duplicity. Depending on the data quality and complexity, we believe an interim solution can be up and operating in as little as a month using the rough performance outline depicted below which would allow for continual improvement to provide even more efficiency and cost avoidance.