Featured Case Studies

Bond makes smart decisions

Bond University was established in 1989 on the Gold Coast, in Queensland, Australia and in 2011 has a population of around 4,500 students.

Bond University was modelled on the traditions of the world’s most elite educational institutions; the vision for Australia’s first private, not-for-profit university was to provide an exclusive educational experience of the highest international standards, under the tutelage of the country’s leading academics.

Today Bond University has adapted to the needs of the workplace, liaising with key employers in all fields to develop programs that reflect the current technological, theoretical and psychological practicalities of the corporate environment. Identifying emerging areas of skills shortage, the curriculum has expanded to include new and in-demand disciplines such as sustainable development, forensic science, medicine, IT management, health sciences and more.

The 2012 Good Universities Guide, an independent consumer guide, rated Bond University five-stars across an impressive ten key performance indicators, making it Australia’s highest rating university.

In particular Bond University dominated the ‘Educational Experience’ categories, receiving the maximum five-star rating across the board; including in the important areas of teaching quality, student-staff ratio and overall satisfaction.

The 2012 Good Universities Guide results highlights the commitment of Bond University to bring a new dimension to tertiary education in Australia and to produce exceptional graduates

Bond University makes smart decisions 

The Challenge

Bond needed to enhance the University’s ability to analyse and report on data to make accurate, timely and informed business decisions in setting and achieving key strategic and operational goals.

At the time many decisions were arrived at after manual, time consuming, and non collaborative processes were run to obtain key data across multiple enterprise system sources.

"There was a lot of SQL data analysis but we couldn’t pull it easily into one report," said Sue Davis, Director of Finance, Financial Services, Bond University. 

Bond identified at the time that they needed to find a way to significantly improve their ability to:

• develop an integrated student enrolment and revenue model that captured extensive data on new enrolled students, integrated into the continuing pipeline of students at EFTS level with full revenue implications disbursed into a budgeting model  
• allow extensive analytical reporting over enrolled student data for strategic marketing purposes
• develop an integrated budget model incorporating the student enrolment model into revenue, a human resource model that allowed FTE analysis by employment status that integrated into an operational expense model and inclusion of capital expenditure
• reduce preparation time of annual budgets by allowing the functionality of faculty and departmental data entry sheets collating simultaneously into one new central system with new reporting capability with a further two year outlook
• allow what-if and sensitivity analysis over budgeting and forecasting information
• provide accurate semesterly forecasting, cost analysis and management of expenses
• have a governance framework around critical data that provided a disciplined approach to consistency in reporting, i.e. one version of truth.

Managing the student enrolment model, load forecasting, cost management and understanding the financial implications at Bond was at times very manual and labour intensive.  The processes were slow, difficult to change and difficult to integrate end to end and placed heavy burdens on individuals to manage and maintain.

Bond needed a solution that provided one principal source of information and could provide accurate and timely data to support and drive decision making, strategy and improvement for the University as a whole and within the  faculties and operational departments.

"We had a small budget, small time frame and we achieved immediate results in a staged process ... Cortell did an amazing job leveraging TM1 to provide a fast Installation and quick deliverables," said Sue Davis.

CiSRA Improves Resource Planning Accuracy with help from Cortell

Challenge

CiSRA had been using spreadsheets for business intelligence but this unsophisticated approach was not an effective way to plan and budget resources on a weekly and monthly basis.

“It became increasingly difficult for project managers to budget and forecast their labour, capital and other expenses,” says CiSRA IT & IS Manager Shane Youl.

CiSRA also had to address technical issues that compromised data consolidation. Because of delays, slow batch processing and manual processes, critical information was not available in a timely manner and, more importantly, was inaccurate.

To support its rapid growth, CiSRA had to revamp its workflow controls to reflect current and future requirements.

Cortell challenged and questioned why we do certain things certain ways

Challenge

Managing the student load forecasting, cost management and consequential financial implications at Griffith was at times a very manual and labour intensive process, something Stuart Jones, Deputy Director, Planning and Financial Services at the University sought to improve.

“The current processes placed heavy burdens on certain individuals to manage and maintain. The processes were slow, difficult to change and certainly difficult to integrate, end to end. The university was very reliant on the skills of a select few and a heavy Excel based framework to support its core financial and student modelling environment”

The university also ran a centralized Data warehouse and an activity based costing solution built on an Oracle and SAS platform. The Data warehouse captured information relevant to the operational aspects of the student but didn’t provide the flexibility and dynamic modeling capability required to capture, consolidate, forecast and model student load plans and subsequent financial metrics.

Further to this the activity based costing module was too difficult to maintain and ideally needed to be integrated to the student and financial planning models.

Enabling Steinhoff to focus on implementing company strategies, rather than planning for them

Challenge

In the past, Steinhoff’s budgets were completed centrally by its finance team, but the company wanted business managers to be more directly responsible.

“We wanted ownership of the numbers to be with the relevant managers to make them accountable for their targets and responsible for their results,” says Louise Cooper, Group Accounting Manager, Steinhoff.

To support this approach, Steinhoff required a new budgeting, forecasting and planning solution that could collect a wide range of operational and financial data.

The system had to include advanced business rules (including franchise calculations) that the company could apply when developing planning scenarios.

Other considerations included the transparency of calculations and the ability to consolidate data so that it reflects both company and brand results. Steinhoff also wanted to minimise the learning curve for managers.

WorkPac solves financial reporting challenges with IBM Cognos and Cortell

Challenge

Andrew Crealy, Chief Financial Officer joined the company in 2007 as Operations Manager for Finance. His task is to manage the day to day running of the financial and accounting reporting and improve the commercial running of the business.

In 2008, Andrew decided it was time for WorkPac to look for a new finance system for forecasting and budgeting. They needed a system that could sit well with the company’s existing platform and one that would enable the forecasting and budgeting to be conducted and produced online.

“When I joined the company we were producing reports in hard copy and sending them out to the branches. It took 3 weeks to produce and mail out the monthly accounting reports and this was just too long. By the time the branch managers received their reports they were already focused on closing the next month rather than the sales and profit budgets,” said Andrew.

Zurich Australia Gains Deeper and More Accurate Insights into Business Performance

Challenge

Zurich had been using spreadsheets for the budgeting, forecasting and planning process across 380 cost centres. Up to 180 managers were involved in the process. Considerable amounts of data needed to be manually consolidated during and at the end of each budget process and review.

The company realised it had to standardise the budgeting processes and streamline financial modelling to reduce inefficiency and produce reports and scenarios within shorter timeframes and with much greater accuracy and collaboration.

In 2008, Zurich began looking for a scalable solution that would be easy to use and provide more precise numbers each month based on actual data.

Cruising ahead with TM1 ... Carnival can now work out total cruise costs and individual elements in less than an hour

Formed in 2004, Carnival Australia is a branch of Carnival plc, and is the backbone of the cruise industry in this region with the P&O Cruises brand, sailing from Australia since December 1932.

Carnival represents six of the international cruise brands operating in the local market: P&O Cruises Australia, P&O Cruises World Cruising, Cunard, Princess Cruises, Holland America Lines and Seabourn. 

Carnival Australia operates six ships sailing year round from Sydney, Melbourne, Fremantle and Auckland under the local brands of P&O Cruises and Princess Cruises. A seventh, Carnival Spirit, arrives in October 2012.

In recent years, cruising has been the standout success of the Australian tourism sector, recording annual growth of nearly 20 per cent for each of the six years to 2010. According to statistics compiled by the International Cruise Council Australasia (ICCA), more than 465,000 Australians took a cruise holiday in 2010 and Carnvial Australia’s CEO Ann Sherry predicts 1 million Australia passengers will be sailing by 2020.

With more bed nights than any hotel chain in Australia, extremely high occupancy every time they sail, a fleet of ships that need constant attention and the need for efficient supply chain management, Carnival had a diverse range of operating challenges.

Challenge

Carnival needed a platform that was flexible enough to cater for individual components of its' operations whilst integrating the cross business functions. They needed to have the insight and accuracy required to drive efficiencies and provide analytics for their service and product offerings.