Queensland University of Technology consolidates budgets within a day, instead of a week, and overhauls budgeting practices.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a selectively research-focused Australian university, catering to 45,000 students, including 7,000 international students. The University employs more than 4,000 permanent staff and over 7,000 casual staff, and consists of six faculties, six divisions, and a number of research institutes spread across two Brisbane city campuses, as well as Caboolture to the north.
Challenge
QUT relies on a decentralised budgeting process, providing university faculties, divisions, and institutes with a high level of input into, and control over, how their allocated funds are spent. This allows these organisational areas to spend funds where they need them most, such as on employing academic staff and supporting student learning and teaching priorities.
However, this decentralised budgeting process created difficulties for the University’s management accounting team (MAT), as compiling a university-wide budget required input from numerous staff throughout the institution. In addition, the process was made even more complex by a lack of standard budgeting tools across the university, as well as limited access to detailed workforce expenditure.
“After implementing Oracle Hyperion, the focus has changed to analysing outputs, rather than the process of data collection, and that in itself is an immeasurable benefit.”
Patricia Alner Director of Planning and Budget, Queensland University of Technology
“We could respond to high-level decision-making requests, but we couldn’t see the fine detail that underpinned the budgeting process,” said Patricia Alner, Director of Planning and Budget, Queensland University of Technology. “This meant I found it difficult to provide detailed answers to some complicated financial questions in a timely fashion."
“Employment costs are a major part of our expenditure, so we really needed a detailed picture of our workforce, and a system that allowed us to plan budgets down to the individual employee level,” she said. “Independent consultants had also recommended to our governance committee that we needed to address the automation of our budgetary process and accelerate our decision-making.”
Why Oracle
QUT was already using Oracle products such as Oracle Financials, which meant it had a high level of in-house Oracle experience and expertise. When it came to choosing a new budgeting platform, Alner said it was the Oracle Hyperion product’s flexibility, robustness, and ability to integrate with Oracle Financials that was appealing.
“Oracle’s Hyperion solutions granted end users the interface they desired while meeting the financial team’s back-end requirements,” she said. “Hyperion’s proven track record in the budgeting and financial management space was also a key factor in our decision.”
“There are often a lot of hyperbolic statements made about technology products, but I want to see it working. When we saw how the Oracle Hyperion system was performing in other organisations, we were very impressed.”
Why DXC
After an open tender process, QUT engaged DXC to implement Oracle Hyperion Planning Essbase across the university.
QUT was implementing a new student administration system at the same time as the Oracle Hyperion budgeting system, so access to internal resources was limited. This made the choice of DXC as an implementation partner a significant factor in the project’s success.
“We needed a partner that specialised in Oracle and Hyperion, and who could accommodate the complexities of the university’s requirements,” said Alner. “DXC has the large-scale implementation experience to tackle a project like this. We didn’t just take the company at face value; we went to some of its implementation sites, so we could ask the hard questions about the tools and DXC’s work.
“Our confidence in DXC was well-founded, and we’d still be struggling with the deployment without the team onboard. It would have taken significantly longer to develop the solution in-house,” she said.
Solution
QUT deployed Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Essbase across the university. It used Oracle Data Integrator to integrate the Hyperion system with Oracle Financials and the University’s ALESCO v12 human resources system.
“We can now produce a consolidated budget in less than a day, whereas it previously took at least a week of trawling through spreadsheets to produce, balance, and check figures.”
Patricia Alner Director of Planning and Budget, Queensland University of Technology
The move to Oracle Hyperion provides a central portal to integrate financial data from all faculties, divisions, and institutes, making it easier for the MAT to bring together the decentralised budgeting process and standardise budgeting practices across the University. The project involved an extended consultation with end
users from various organisational areas, resulting in comprehensive business and technical requirement statements, which contain user expectations for functionality and technical capabilities that best fit the university’s IT environment.
“The staff that were developing the budgets in the faculties, divisions, and institutes already had their own, very established systems—many of them Excel-based—so the move to Hyperion wasn’t just a technical project but also a change-management exercise,” said Alner.
“As our financial staff was comfortable using these Excel spreadsheets, Hyperion was a good fit because it could offer end users an Excel-style experience while still giving us the flexibility and strength we needed at the back end,” she said. “Thanks to Hyperion, we could make sure everyone is budgeting for their organisational areas using the same standards and applying the same rates and cost increments, rather than using different calculations in separate spreadsheets. We’ve prescribed these set rates in the Hyperion system and they can’t be overridden, so we’re all on the same page.”