Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC), with a population of over 250,000 has implemented IBM business analytics software to help transform its budget planning process and improve analysis and interpretation of performance. IBM Business Analytics is powered by IBM Cognos TM1.
Like many other Local Government organisations, Rotherham’s Financial Services directorate works with and on behalf of Council Members, Strategic Directors and directorate budget holders to capture the council’s spending priorities, budget pressures and the improvement and efficiency plans to prepare the Council’s budget covering the next three years.
Prior to using IBM Business Analytics, finance staff were building multiple Excel spreadsheets to capture and manipulate financial data to produce the latest budget plans – and as a result had less flexibility to adapt to a changing working environment. With pockets of data being duplicated across a number of spreadsheets, the entire process proved very resource intensive and left the finance team undertaking additional work to be in a position to provide a rolling budget position across each of the three planning years.
“Our goal was to modernise and transform working practices and create a single view of accurate planning information that could be sliced and diced giving us the ability to proactively respond to ‘what-if’ questions in a more timely manner,” said Stuart Booth, Director of Central Finance.
“Of huge benefit is the fact that we now have a single integrated solution that enforces referential data integrity. Additionally, we plan to deploy IBM software for automated workflow management to increase governance and control over the budget planning process. Although it is early days, we anticipate that the level of resources and therefore cost of preparing budgets will reduce,” concluded Stuart Booth.
