Enhanced decision-making for national nonprofit
Starlight Children’s Foundation unleashes the potential of FP&A to drive innovation.
Customer Profile
Starlight Children’s Foundation is a nonprofit in Australia operating nationally with a mission to deliver happiness for children and young people. They have worked with healthcare professionals for over 30 years to bring fun, joy, and laughter to children and young people with chronic conditions.
They are the broadest reaching children’s charity in Australia, with a wide range of programs to give seriously ill children a break from their medical treatment.
An organization focused on innovation; Starlight made the decision to invest in an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution to make better business decisions.
3rd Rock worked with the customer in re-deploying Jedox to unlock the overall functionality, scalability, and performance.
Business Challenges
Struggling with a reliance on Excel for planning and reporting, Starlight Children‘s Foundation needed to both support Finance and enable those who sit outside the Finance function with unified data and more accurate planning.
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Starlight’s key goal was to enhance their decision-making process. Aiming to
do this while increasing their internal operational efficiencies with a scalable
solution, the need for a modern planning & budgeting process was quickly
recognized as a key imperative.
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First implemented to replicate their existing legacy planning and reporting,users realized a clear lack of details and reporting was found to be hard to understand with disparate data and complex roll-ups.
Their key objectives were
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Significant time reduction in data gathering – releasing time for analysis,
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Reduced cycle time for budgeting, forecasting and financial close processes,
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Improve forecast accuracy,
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Minimise risk of errors due to manual processing and consolidation,
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Removed reliance on “off-line” Excel spreadsheets
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Enabling innovation to support better business decisions
3rd Rock engaged with the Customer to identify, design, and implement a solution that met the Customer requirements, while also adhering to the budget and quality parameters.
Starlight’s key goal was to enhance their decision-making process. Aiming to
do this while increasing their internal operational efficiencies with a scalable
solution, the need for a modern planning & budgeting process was quickly
recognized as a key imperative.
They began their finance transformation journey with a newly created FP&A role
in 2019. They needed to support finance directly and help build financial
capabilities for team members who sit outside the finance function. Previously
using Excel, they needed a scalable solution with broader capabilities.
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Results & Outcomes
Flexible, full suite reporting with complete oversight & governance.
"This solution is great for cross functional relationships and collaboration. Now we are just flying because we can drill down, drill across, and everyone can see what they are responsible for in the organization. We did not have that before."
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- Anna Schell ( FP&A Starlight)
Starlight engaged 3rd Rock to look into how best to utilize Jedox functionality with the fresh set of eyes.. This meant adding to and restructuring data in source systems. 3rd Rock re-implemented Jedox to support the business analysis, board reporting, planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
Today, a full suite of reporting is done through the solution. Cost centers and program managers can easily see data they need when they need it with greater flexibility, which their previous solution lacked. The solution implementation resulted in ​significant time reduction in data gathering - making more time for analysis. This has also resulted in reduction in cycle time for budgeting and reporting processes.
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The process and calculation are now centrally governed and removing Excel dependencies has minimized the risk of errors due to manual processing; and remove reliance on “off-line” excel spreadsheets. The solution framework allows the customer to work on a collaborative environment with centralized data storage, centrally governed calculation, and authorization to plan and report data real-time. Starlight's capacity to perform analytics and ad-hoc analysis has improved considerably.
From disconnected to empowered, they are able to:
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Consolidate financial data from SAP with planning information at role-based level with easy access through the Cloud,
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Model detailed workforce planning and program costing without complex spreadsheets,
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Perform ‘what-if’ analysis on the data,
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Have complete oversight of business financial and fundraising position for the coming years.
With their Finance team driving adoption of Jedox, Starlight is focused on minimizing mundane reporting tasks so they can focus on analysis, story-telling and value-add tasks. Then remove the next sentence about the Board.
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