“We found Decision Inc. Team to have excellent knowldege of finance processes and activities.”
– Nigel Maughan, FP&A Transformation Lead at Serco

Decision Inc. UK has completed the global implementation of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) at professional services company, Serco Group, to streamline the financial planning processes across its global operation.

The Requirements

In 2016, Serco conducted a thorough analysis of its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes. This resulted in the organisation identifying a strategic need to improve, enhance, and standardise business planning across its operations. It found that financial planning was a ‘high effort, low reward’ process with outputs lacking the desired accuracy.

In August 2016, Serco engaged SAP partner Decision Inc. UK (DI) to implement an SAP BPC solution with the following core objectives:

• Provide a single, centralised system for the preparation of monthly forecasts and annual budget data
• Focus on financial planning rather than operational planning in order to reduce the granularity of, and time taken to prepare/capture monthly forecast and annual budget data
• Improve the consistency of and confidence in financial plan data and processes
• Establish a group wide planning policy
• Reduce proliferation of inconsistent offline excel models and leverage system intelligence to reduce manual effort

The Solution

By combining a recognised enterprise performance
management platform in SAP BPC with specialist
partner, DI, Serco benefitted from a robust, easy to
use solution that was delivered on time and on
budget.

Decision Inc.’s proven track record in project
management, change management, and process
design, alongside technical delivery, also helped Serco
ensure the successful adoption of the tool across the
Group.

The Solution Delivered:

• Highly integrated solution (Resourcing, Profit and Loss (P&L), Inter Company, Capex, Balance Sheet, Cashflow, Risks & Ops)
• Standardised inputs and outputs
• Automated driver based derivation of staff costs (50,000 employees)
• Automation of central IT resource supply and demand planning
• Automated integration with source systems (transactional and master data)
• Extensive business calculations replacing manual effort
• End user classroom training delivery to 200+ users in five international locations
• Workflow and approval framework
• BPC 10.1 NW on HANA replacing multiple offline spreadsheets and disparate tactical solutions

The Benefits:

 “The FP&A Project was very successful, met most, if not all of its success criteria, and has been well received in the business by both the user group and by our senior managers,” says Maughan.

 According to Maughan, the solution successfully delivered the following:

• Greater visibility of Year 1, 2, and 3 of full financial data including P&L and Cash
• An integrated BPC system utilising existing data to drive monthly updated forecasting
• Reduced effort to free up capacity in finance teams to focus on Business Partnering activities

Additional Benefits

• The solution enabled the business to move to monthly forecasting whereas previous quarterly forecasting was not achieved in a timely or consistent basis

• Solution used globally by 250 staff, for planning and reporting (Resourcing, P&L, Inter Company, Capex, Balance Sheet, Cashflow, Risks & Ops) across the UK and Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East

• A consistent and standardised system allowed the business to design, implement and manage a single groupwide FP&A policy

• Transparent, integrated, and streamlined budgeting, forecasting, and reporting

• Reduction in manual effort and time to complete

• Comprehensive ‘in process’ reporting suite facilitating efficient review process

• The solution allowed the business to focus on interpretation and decision making rather than preparation and reconciliation

• Rationalisation of c. 125 individual P&L planning models into one standard P&L model

• Creation of BCM (Business Change Manager) network to support adoption of technical solution and new ways of working

• Engagement and buy in from all regions

About Decision Inc.

Decision Inc. is a global leader in information-driven transformation with a core focus on data, digital and  performance intelligence. Our expertise in technology and industry specialisations have enabled us to help companies around the world make better decisions faster. Our emphasis on local excellence and global scale enables us to bring clients best of breed technology solutions that enable significant improvement whilst leveraging our Global Research and Innovation teams to accelerate the time to insight. Our local consulting teams are experts in the implementation, support and execution of these solutions and work with our clients to deliver real results and improvement.