The customer's challenge
The customer's challenge
As one of our best-known non-profit charitable organisations, the client manages over 1 billion in donor funds per year. The cost base can be broken down at an overall level into fundraising costs and administration costs. The client has strict requirements to meet the efficiency targets set by the Board. To achieve its objectives, the client works with a long-term plan that is broken down into a budget for the coming financial year.The client's budget process was inefficient, lacked flexibility and needed to be done at an overall level. The inefficiency, which was mainly due to limited system support, made the budget process take a long time. The limited flexibility made it difficult to "tweak" assumptions and work with iterations in the budget process. Having to make an overall budget limited the possibility of using budget as a control tool at cost centre level. Allocating central administrative costs to cost centres that were the ones consuming these common resources had to be done using standard allocation keys.
We also offer NetSuite Enterprise Budget Planning, read more here
System before/after
System before/after
The client used a system for budgeting based on their previous ERP system, but only cost budgeting was done there. The department responsible for collecting donations did its revenue budget in Excel. The budget was also consolidated and summarised in Excel. Excel was used to calculate some of the cost budget and to calculate allocations using allocation keys.
Solution
Solution
The customer implemented NetSuite ERP in combination with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting (NSPB). NSPB became the common system for budgeting and monitoring. The reporting and budgeting requirements of NSPB also served as requirements for setting up segments and custom segments in NetSuite. Thus, a fully integrated solution could be developed, where metadata for common dimensions/segments can be retrieved directly from NetSuite. All outcome data has been seamlessly integrated with NSPB. The data integration is now fully automated and the jobs that update the data retrieved from NetSuite also include aggregation and calculations running in NSPB.
The budget solution includes both revenue budgeting and cost budgeting. Driver-based budgeting is used both on the revenue side and the cost side, where NSPB calculates revenue based on input of number of donations and staff costs are based on input of FTE (Full Time Equivalents) and Headcount. The allocation solution developed for the budget is also applied to the outcome data, to ensure a fair follow-up of outcome against budget. With NSPB, the customer can work in a more decentralised way by using navigation flows configured for different user groups. This ensures an efficient input process in budgeting.
Result
Result
The NSPB solution that the customer has implemented means that they have a common solution for budgeting. With NSPB, the customer has streamlined its budget work by the entire organisation using the same budget system that covers both more basic and more advanced needs. NSPB has enabled a more flexible budget model with, for example, driver-based budget in selected areas. The system's powerful calculation functionality covers all requirements for more advanced allocation calculations. The automated data integration leads to better data quality and the possibility of more detailed analyses in the follow-up. With NSPB, the client has satisfied both its internal operational reporting requirements along with reporting requirements to the board and external stakeholders.
Conclusions
Conclusions
The client is now using the most powerful budgeting system on the market, which means it has been able to streamline its budgeting process. The customer now also has better opportunities to analyse their business to find new areas where cost efficiency can be improved. NSPB is also flexible, which means that the system can be adapted over time to meet changing requirements and a changing environment. With certain adaptations, the system can be used for a long time to come.
We carry out at least 20 different assignments in parallel, which means that our experience bank is developing at a rapid pace. To give you inspiration for projects that can be similar to your current challenges, we share here what we have learnt from others that will benefit you in a future assignment.
What we have done
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Customer case3 min reading timeThe charity that benefited from its investment in NetSuite ERP and was able to streamline and improve its budget process
The client, a large non-profit charitable organisation, had an inefficient and rigid budgeting process that was preventing them from achieving their efficiency goals. By implementing NetSuite ERP and NetSuite Planning and Budgeting (NSPB),... -
Customer case2 min reading timeA market leader in a global petrol and retail group that needed to streamline its supply chain.
During the course of the project, a number of challenges were identified that prevented them from achieving the change desired by the category managers in the Swedish organisation. Their culture, team spirit... -
Customer case1 min reading timeThe electric boat company that wanted to switch to serial production
The company was still a venture capital-funded development company where each new product delivered to the customer had its own technical specification, which discouraged planning, standardisation of components and planning of purchases. It... -
Customer case2 min reading timeThe global engineering consultant who wanted to increase project profitability
The company has had an acquisition-driven strategy for many years and is adept at integrating staff functions and business systems, but along the way had failed to harmonise the delivery process to the customer.... -
Customer case2 min reading timeOperationalising project management in a Nordic construction company to support all project managers through a process-oriented approach.
Their existing business/management system, which is currently on SharePoint, is characterised by thousands of documents containing long routines, policies, large amounts of text and outdated information for those who will be running the projects. This leads... -
Customer case2 min reading timeGuiding two different companies within the same group towards a joint decision on a new business system.
When we started the system procurement with our customer, they had two different business systems, one of which would cease to be supported at the end of next year and the other would need to be upgraded and lifted.... -
Customer case2 min reading timeThe retailer who wanted to implement a deviation management system underpinned by a harmonised approach across all countries in the business.
The customer's business in the workwear, tools and personal protection industry was characterised by decentralised processes, with different countries having different levels of progress in terms of whether a system support was in place to manage and monitor... -
Customer case1 min reading timeCustomer needed to streamline e-commerce with new warehouse management systems
For retailers, as for many other industries, e-commerce has been a clearly growing business in recent years and is becoming increasingly important for the major players in the market. But e-commerce... -
Customer case1 min reading timeThe industrial company that needed to create standardised HR processes
A major customer of Rededge in the manufacturing industry wanted to harmonise their HR processes across borders. With factories on several continents, there were major challenges in finding a "unifying" system support that...