A Super View for Enterprise Business Planning

With a vision to be the proud and trusted partner of industry super funds in Australia, $75b of funds under management for 6 million members and growing, Superpartners needed an enterprise view for its business planning.

In 2008/9, CSC undertook the first SAP partner led implementation of SAP’s business planning and consolidation product in Australia whilst introducing a new ERP system for Superpartners.

The Challenge

Since the early 1990s, Superpartners has grown in size and complexity. At the same time demand has increased from managers and regulators for regular, complete and timely financial reporting.

The annual budget process was becoming more complex and difficult to track. Regulatory requirements and strict guidelines for consolidating and reporting company information were demanding.

With 1,600 staff located in eight offices in Australian capital cities, Superpartners’ existing financial reporting systems struggled to support the basic risk needs.

The Solution

Superpartners embarked on a major change program, engaging CSC to deliver an enterprise financial system using SAP’s new generation Business Objects Business Planning & Consolidation for Netweaver (BPC) modelling tool.

With its structured and flexible suite of functionality, BPC promised business users the ability to design bespoke solutions and build planning applications interfacing with data from SAP applications such as the General Ledger. Importantly for Superpartners, an architected solution, BPC is based on an enterprise-wide platform with data held in a central source accessible from multiple points for data input, modelling and reporting.

Throughout the project, CSC adopted its four step planning approach – Discovery, Design, Develop, Deploy – developed over a number of successful projects using previous generations of SAP Business Intelligence planning tools.

CSC handed over the completed business planning production environment to Superpartners’ business owners to operate and manage.

The Results

Superpartners has entered the first budget cycle. The results achieved so far are listed below.

• Improved agility by centrally modelling new business scenarios
• Reduced cycle time for creating and approving plans, budgets, and forecasts
• Minimised business and compliance risk through transparent financial data
• Increased user productivity from an intuitive interface and familiar office tools
• Enterprise visibility with two year forecasting