How Etnic digitized budgets with SAP Analytics Cloud

As the IT provider to the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Etnic needs to build a budget yearly to receive funding from the Federation . To automate the data collection and aggregation, Etnic decided to implement SAP Analytics Cloud Planning, with the help of Flexso. This is how it went down.

As any institution working in public services, Etnic must build a yearly budget to receive funding from FWB for all necessary IT services. Up until recently, they were doing this mainly with Excel files. Employees would go around the organization, collect all information and aggregate this data in one masterfile. This process meant a lot of manual work and a higher chance of human error. Etnic started looking for a scalable solution to increase efficiency and bring budget consideration closer to business users.

SAP Analytics Cloud Planning ticks all boxes

To determine the right solution, Etnic did a pre-study with al involved stakeholders. Their needs and challenges were consolidated in a list of requirements.
Overall, the solution had to:

It must be user-friendly;
Stay as standard as possible to avoid custom development;
Get rid of financial terms so business users would get a clear understanding of their Input within the entire process;
Increase efficiency: win time and decrease errors;
Store and keep a full history of operational budget in a single location;
Use the same tool to build, approve and control the budget;
Integrate with the existing SAP ERP.

SAP Analytics Cloud ticked all the boxes. The solution uses one single source of truth for operating the budget calculations and could be Integrated easily with the existing SAP ERP-system.

Looking for a trusted solution to meet your budget requirements?

SAP Analytics Cloud provides reliable insights and supports making enterprise-wide decisions.

An added advantage of the pre-study was that it offered Etnic the opportunity to document and review their business processes. This means the business project was analyzed quicker and the time between start and delivery could be drastically reduced.

Focus on change management

From a technical point of view, the implementation was quite straightforward: build, test, train users and go live. One of the key focus areas was change management, since more than 50 users needed to be trained.

To get the highest buy-in possible, Etnic asked Flexso to train all users, which led to a very high adoption rate and user satisfaction.

Users now have a complete overview of the budget, and can follow up online which components of the budget are approved or declined. In the old way of working, they would input numbers in July, and get a final decision in December on a budget they hardly recognized anymore. This transparency is a major benefit to increasing user adoption.

Time, accuracy and transparency

Calculating and building the budget in SAP Analytics Cloud led to a significant increase in speed. Before, creating every separate Excel and then aggregating this into one master file took at least a week. And when something changed, which traditionally happens a few times, the master file had to be recalculated.

With SAP Analytics Cloud, any new or altered input is automatically aggregated and management can follow up on the latest version in real-time. This control and real-time overview is a huge benefit to both the users and management. Not to mention it saves employees over a week of straining Excel-work.

Moreover, the number of errors was reduced to virtually zero. Since users are selecting values from an existing database, it’s impossible to make typos and create a value that doesn’t exist. Reports can now be made in real-time to get the latest version of the budget. As the new data is now directly uploaded into federation’s SAP ERP, this entire reporting process is now also automated.

As of today, Etnic's business users take full ownership and operate the budget flows In SAP Analytics Cloud. With all data centralized in one platform, historical data can now be tracked and compared throughout the following years. A prime example of how digitization of manual processes leads to increased efficiency and offers major business benefits.