Performance Winner

‘When looking at the numbers, you need a firm grip on the cost flow value drivers that are inherent in the daily business processes,’ says Mandeep Hansra, head of business intelligence strategy and systems at BT. ‘These are significantly more important, but also much more difficult to stitch into the overall process.’

There is a view that the ability of senior finance managers to obtain the desired numerical vision is being hampered by disparate software. Research consultancy Gartner recently reported that firms still had too much software, too many licences and were suffering from vendors that sought to stop them migrating to other programmes. Gartner said businesses needed to recognise that IT is a changing rather than a moving platform and therefore the RoI from IT investments heavily depends on how long they remain fit for purpose.

Hansra says that, even at BT, which is plugged directly into the ERP veins of its global networking customers, the issue highlighted by Gartner is relevant. ‘We, like any large organisation, have this challenge,’ he says. ‘However, our real drive over the last year and a half has been to standardise on Oracle. Wherever possible we are reducing the multiplicity of vendors and we are reducing the multiplicity of licences. There are still many areas just within the EPM finance mandate where we have duplications in application functionality, as well as to a degree, duplication in roles.’

Six years ago, explains Hansra, BT outsourced a number of its transaction services initially as a costarbitrage proposition. ‘But you bank these savings almost immediately and move on to new challenges with your outsourcing partners,’ he says. ‘You introduce new dynamics, new ways of measuring and improving business, exploring new areas that perhaps hadn’t been considered previously, because either the outsourcer has introduced a new vision or automation and fresh business focus has delivered an opportunity.’

Road to integration Meanwhile, consolidation within the ERP/EPM space continues apace with the main producers buying up the third-party suppliers. This can be awkward if the thirdparty supplier is not the one adopted by a business to run its core ERP system. However, BT has been fortunate in that Hyperion, the EPM system adopted five years ago, was bought by Oracle last year.

‘Our first incarnation of Hyperion was effectively putting in a reasonably basic financial planning module and then a standardised management reporting module,’ says Hansra. ‘It provided a standard way in which we generated our accounts, helping management by delivering a consistent view and focus around the month-end processes. This provided a more stable line of sight, control and forecasting – a reliable and repeatable process delivering reliable business data. From this foundation we pushed out Hyperion to other lines of business, to the extent that we now have a standardised set of Hyperion applications across of UK operations – from planning and forecasting to management reporting.

‘This consolidation on Hyperion has also been done at group level and is being rolled out separately to our global services operation. It is all coming together and integrating well. Oracle was renowned at the database and ERP level, less so at the consolidation level. So bringing those two together in what is known as the fusion EPM structure is exactly where we were heading before the acquisition of Hyperion. The integrated platform is beginning to take shape and is promoting the upward data consolidating processes as well as drilling down from a Hyperion environment to base, sub-ledger transactions that have been brought into a data warehouse.’ EPM is not, however, just about software, something which Hansra readily acknowledges.

‘There are other critical components in ensuring a successful EPM experience. Meta-data management is fundamental, as is setting the broader theme of changing business behaviour without which a company cannot be a performance winner.’

While BT has worked successfully with Hyperion and Oracle, one internal challenge for Hansra is to maintain the focus within the business and temper premature calls for new software. ‘One can very easily get diverted by making what I would call quite significant tactical investments that take us away from our standardisation agenda,’ he says. ‘So I push very hard to say "No, you have to wait for the full implementation of the Hyperion programme", though there must be a degree of realism where business critical impact demands a more immediate solution.’

Less is more

Another challenge has been to convince people of the virtue of delivering less volume in terms of reporting.

‘There was a view when we talked about less reporting, that people would be missing something,’ he says. ‘In fact we have reduced a lot of duplication. We have rationalised a lot of our management reporting processes and outputs to a significantly smaller and manageable number. This allows executives, operational and middle managers to have that consistent line of sight. But I’m glad to say that in the UK and across our Global Services Division, they’re all very much on-message.’

Hansra accepts that change management, especially when it involves IT, is not always easy.

‘Articulating the proposals and encouraging people to join on a business change agenda and a business value agenda is essential,’ he says. ‘You can tell people they will have a faster month-end, there will be fewer errors and they will get flash results earlier. For Global Services, you can say they will be able to consolidate across different countries in a standard way, rather than via Excel and manual activity to get the figures in and out of the system. All that appeals to finance guys, who are targeted to close books, produce good results and analyses, and they look and say: "OK, I’d buy that. Show me more." You get them to the part of the vision which says that they can depend on this process and trust the data because we can give them a bit more insight and analysis on that same data.’

Legacy thinking

Amid many challenges, Mandeep Hansra tries to keep things simple. Though now a very different company from its preprivatisation days, he says BT still demands performanceleading capability and a focus on quality not quantity.

‘We have been pushing very hard to deliver a lower volume of reporting,’ explains Hansra. ‘As with all large organisations, particularly one like ours, with constant change over a number of years, you tend to get a lot of duplication. So we have reduced and rationalised a lot of our management reporting processes and outputs to a significantly smaller number. This allows all the managers to have that consistent line of sight.’

The essence is to keep the project as simple as possible. ‘It needs to be driven from the top down,’ says Hansra. ‘Look at the top-level KPIs needed to run your business and then flush down further, working out how you want middle and junior management to work through and deliver those processes and numbers. That in turn will drive how you want data coded. A top-down view drives the right process, behaviour and data; just coming up with a bit of coding willy-nilly is never going to work. You’re then faced with a myriad of processes and that generates the ubiquitous Excel industry, which we all hate.’