St John Ambulance halves month-end closures time, improves forecasting efficiency, and enhances user satisfaction with Oracle EPM Cloud.
“To ensure a smooth implementation, it is important to involve business users and understand their requirements. This makes the transition to the cloud service very easy and trouble free.”
Antony Smithson Finance and administration director, St John Ambulance
St John Ambulance is an Australian nonprofit organisation that provides a world class ambulance service and first aid services to the Australian community. It generates funding through the provision of ambulance, first aid training, and allied health services.
Challenge
To increase budget forecasting efficiency and aid the sustainability of the organisation, St John wanted to improve system performance and gain insight into the financial status of the fee-earning and funded areas of its business.
The organisation wanted to increase visibility into the financial performance of multiple business units — including metro ambulance, country ambulance, first aid training, and health services — and provide insight into the funding status of each unit, as fee-earning, contracted services, and funded by charitable contribution.
Enhancing user satisfaction by migrating to a highly available planning cloud platform to support efficient month-end closures was also an important consideration to the organisation, along with supporting the possible future rollout to 100 volunteer sub-centres by enabling users in the regional areas to easily access data via the cloud platform and create faster financial reports.
Solution
St John previously engaged Oracle partner, DXC Technology to manage its legacy Oracle Hyperion. It decided to use DXC again for the migration project to Oracle Planning. They provided technical support and collaborated with St John and Oracle throughout the implementation.
“DXC was completely involved and deeply invested in every aspect of the project,” said Antony Smithson, finance and administration director, St John Ambulance. “The team made every effort to ensure that Oracle Planning was the right solution for us.”
St John spent approximately six months developing the new financial model with Oracle Planning. After Oracle provided the single sign-on, St John’s finance users successfully installed the system without IT involvement. The new platform went live before the next budgeting cycle and was within budget.
“To ensure a smooth implementation, it is important to involve business users and understand their requirements. This makes the transition to the cloud service very easy and trouble free,” said Antony Smithson.
“By using a flexible and intuitive Oracle Planning, we halved month-end closure time and increased forecasting efficiency.”
Antony Smithson Finance and administration director, St John Ambulance
Result
“By using a flexible and intuitive Oracle Planning, we halved month-end closure time and increased forecasting efficiency,” said Antony Smithson. “The complete visibility we gained into financial performance also boosted user confidence and provided our executives with valuable insight.”
The new solution halved the time to create month-end reports from 10 days to five days and enabled finance staff to focus on strategic tasks. In addition, it improved forecasting efficiency — just half a day instead of one week — and enabled users in regional areas to work offline and easily upload planning data.
In addition to boosting team morale and satisfaction by building a flexible and reliable financial model, the Oracle solution also reduced IT costs by gaining automatic system upgrades and cutting annual support requirement, and supported better budget forecasting by seamlessly feeding employee data from the HR systems into Oracle Planning.
“The team made every effort to ensure that Oracle Planning was the right solution for us.”
Antony Smithson Finance and administration director, St John Ambulance