Capital Budgeting Process Automation

The Business Process Automation Challenge

A large pharmaceutical organization wanted to automate its’ yearly IT capital budget planning process. The client utilizes a bottom-up approach to create the IT capital budget and incorporates dozens of spreadsheets from across the organization to be consolidated by the IT Finance department. The IT capital budgets needed to be summed by accounts and projects for the use by various financial planning systems.

Problems experienced in the past included; the use of different spreadsheet templates, misalignment of account names & cost centers vocabularies, and differing versions of capital planning spreadsheets. All of these issues delayed and hindered the capital planning process. The IT Finance team had difficulty consolidating the multiple sources for reporting the status of cost center budgets and the final capital planning numbers.

The Solution

The IT Finance team had no control over data input; too many spreadsheets to consolidate and inconsistent data definitions were used throughout the organization. Simple Excel templates had been tried in the past, but they lacked security to ensure the correct data definitions were used and the multiple individual spreadsheets did not help the IT Finance team consolidate the capital planning information.

Tool Creation – Intellilink developed a customized application to support the capital planning process and was able to quickly deploy a cost effective solution by utilizing Intuit’s QuickBase (TM) tool. The application allowed the IT Finance organization to control the vocabulary used in the capital planning process. All accounts, projects and cost center information changes were controlled by the IT Finance team. The application, being web-based, supported multiple users from all across the country and provided a single database of capital planning information. This prevented multiple versions of budgets from existing and being confused with one another. The IT Finance team could actively report the status of budgets for cost centers and projects as the most current information was always available in a single location.

Change Management - Automating a process will do little to enhance performance unless a solid Change Management program is created to ensure user buy-in. Recognizing this Intellilink created scenario based training materials and led live and web based training sessions with all the top managers within IT. Utilizing real data from the previous year’s capital planning budget, the training allowed the users to walk through every aspect of the capital budgeting process and to understand the benefits that automation provides to users and the IT Finance team. Reinforcing actual benefits to the users during training helped “sell” the new tool and provided a strong message of support. In addition, based on feedback from the training workshops numerous enhancements were made to the application to improve the support of the capital budgeting process.