eKourier April 2018

FINANCE

Time to get on BOARD

T he use of business intelligence (BI), a data analysis process aimed at boosting business performance by helping key decision makers collect, store, retrieve and analyse data to make better- informed decisions is very prevalent in this new era of decision making. At Kennards Finance we continuously keep looking for better ways of influencing and delivering business outcomes, the latest initiative is a new and sophisticated tool BOARD. At Kennards Finance we continu- ously keep looking for better ways of influencing and delivering business outcomes, the latest initiative is a new and sophisticated tool BOARD. ‘

Aimed at keeping pace with our business growth and realising the opportunities, both internal and external. We were looking for a suitable replacement for our current reporting tool which has shown significant limitations over the past few years with limited or no scope for improvements. A close review through our business partners Professional Advantage helped us identify BOARD as a suitable replace- ment. This change has been reviewed to ensure alignment to our IT strategy and future changes in business processes. • Ease of search for information, interacting with data to perform analysis. • Automation of KPI Reporting through BI that is not excel based. More dynamic. • Interact with data from other systems like Preceda to facilitate more automated (payroll) reporting. • Drill down to the source – this function- ality will assist to review transactional details more efficiently. The benefits: • BI, Performance Management and Analytics – all in one single platform.

• Move to the ‘Cloud’ and off Kennards servers to ensure maximum speed and high performance. • Online and more interactive budgeting process; made simpler. • Ability to link to Storman data to carry out business analysis (after set up of the data warehouse). • Managed and developed by Finance with limited IT support. Phase 1 implementation will include 2019 budgets to be rolled out in May/June via BOARD. Communication will be sent out to Teams shortly. Phase 2 implementation in conjunction with the data warehouse will be a big step towards automating KPI Reports. We look forward to welcoming the KSS Team on BOARD… Sathish Gopinath Financial Controller • Compatibility with our accounting software Great Plains.

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12 Kennards Kourier April 2018