Revolutionising revenue streams

When Taronga Conservation Society (Taronga) wanted to address its key business objectives and complement its digital transformation journey, it turned to SAP solutions partner Techwave Australia. Techwave leveraged the next gen in cloud analytics to assist the renowned wildlife conservation society to revolutionise its performance management platform.

The problem

Taronga’s strategic decision-making and visibility were limited due to the lack of integration and data availability, which impacted the efficiency of critical tasks such as budgeting, forecasts and revenue planning. The budgeting team was suffering from a very long manual planning cycle, affecting further future investments.

Efficiencies needed to be achieved in the planning process to reduce the time taken to complete the planning cycles, along with greater transparency and auditability of financial data.

Traditionally, Taronga’s budgeting and forecasting functions associated were arduous. Budgets were prepared manually, importing data from the S/4HANACloud system and other legacy systems into an MS Excel workbook, which was submitted to finance for consolidation, review (often in multiple iterations) and approval. The agreed budget was then manually loaded into the ECC system. With both corporate cash flow and business plan generation being Excel-based manual processes, integration was minimal.

The solution

Techwave was a logical choice for Taronga when choosing a systems integrator to transform its manual planning, forecasting and reporting systems.

“The SAC solution provided by Techwave helped streamline the review, approval and submission of the manpower planning part of Taronga’s budgeting process. There were efficiencies gained in the form of reduced manual consolidations and increased accessibility of employee costs budget data to cost centre managers in an accurate and timely manner,” said Leonard Lek, Taronga’s finance manager.

Techwave worked with Taronga to address these concerns by streamlining and automating its underlying management processes.

Techwave integrated critical reference data into SAP’s Analytics Cloud (SAC) and, in doing so, upgraded Taronga’s on-premises ERP from SAP ECC-6 to S4 HANA (finance transactional system). This modernised the performance management platform using SAP Success Factors and improved data traceability, thus significantly reducing the time to analyse and plan.

From insightful discussions during the extensive business process mapping workshops for the finance and other business managers, where 20 different revenue streams were identified, to integrating the driver-based budgeting solution, it was all achieved following a pandemic-constrained project schedule.

The benefits

Today’s solution incorporates a flexible self-service aspect that enables Taronga executives to simulate their business results by filtering the key drivers. It augments data traceability and enables the finance team to invest more time conducting critical analyses of the budgets rather than spending time completing onerous manual consolidations.

Techwave’s experience in the EPM domain allowed it to design and deliver a performance management solution that automates budgeting for Taronga’s 20+ revenue streams and provides the management with accuracy in forecasts, and confidence in plans while reducing cycle time and manual intervention.

With more time to concentrate on the strategic direction of Taronga, the Society can invest in building the Sydney Zoo and Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo to be more wild and wonderful when visitors can return, post-COVID.

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