Business Intellegence Solution

About the Program

Category: Financial Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

The Environmental Services finance staff has designed and implemented Phase I of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution to support fact-based decision-making at a low cost and with minimum IT involvement. We have Executive dashboards with a high level view as well as the ability to drill down into the business. There is also a 4-year trend analysis and forecasting component to anticipate business changes and manage their outcome. Phase I consisted of model design, programming, data gathering and testing and limited implementation to three finance staff. The program began in October 2014 and it has been fully operational since January 2015. It has enabled the finance staff to double its efficiency and has improved decision-making. On an annualized basis, we have saved approximately 70 hours of data manipulation time while increasing business visibility within the management team. We achieved these results with a modest investment of $25,348 for 5 licenses and annual maintenance expenses of $1,515. Phase I is self-supporting and will sustain the efficiencies gained for many years to come with minimal additional cost. We expect to add more phases in the future.