Building Tomorrow's Budgeting Solution At A Leading Public Sector Organization

Company Background

Since its inception more than 40 years ago, our client has been a leading scientific research and technology organization in the public sector.

Business Issue

For more than a decade, our client struggled with the familiar business challenge of integrating vast amounts of data from its disparate, non-standardized and obsolete information systems. Leveraging past efforts, the organization established an Integrated Financial Management Program (IFMP) to improve agency-wide business processes and information systems through technology and integration.

The IFMP began seeing early successes with its first cornerstone implementation of SAP R/3 and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) in parallel. However, the IFMP faced new challenges in integrating additional agency-wide business processes and both SAP and non-SAP associated applications within the organization's environment.

Inforte's Solution

Inforte worked closely with our client and SAP to develop an agency-wide budget formulation and reporting system that would allow the client's budgeting community, consisting of 10 centers and more than 1,500 users from headquarters, to build and control the annual budget and access financial planning information that is consistent, reliable and timely across the entire agency.

Inforte delivered the SAP BW, SEM BPS solution after taking an active part in developing the IFMP's budget formulation functional and technical blueprints. With an extensive background in SAP R/3, SAP BW, SAP SEM BPS and SAP Public Sector, Inforte was integral to the success of the overall quality of the budget formulation system. Inforte designed an integrated information and process model that supported the full budgeting process with SEM BPS and seamlessly merged budget formulation application data with budget execution data to provide enhanced business analysis beyond the capabilities of SAP R/3 reporting. Additional highlights of the solution included 11 flavors of allocations, BW realignments, Master Data Management, collaborative multi-group budget planning, budget versioning, business rules, a unified security model, full-budget analytics, data conversions and a real-time interface to the legacy eBUDGET system.

Business Benefits Delivered

The operations and management staff now have the ability to develop center-specific budgets feeding into a consolidated agency-wide budget that can support both bottom-up and top-down development and control processes. In addition, the system allows budget users to analyze crossfunctional, multi-level and organization-wide budget information.

The budget formulation system supports the client's goal of a single agency-wide budget formulation and reporting capability that makes the annual budgeting process more efficient, accurate and reconcilable with execution data. Upon this system, the organization will be able to build future budget formulation solutions as the agency's materializing needs are aligned with the overall IFMP EA (Enterprise Architecture) strategy and SAP NetWeaver product set.