Putting Middle East Region’s key railway operator on the fast track to growth
Key Outcomes
Significantly shorter budget cycle
Full-cycle automation of Planning and Budgeting
Improved accuracy in budget fund transfers
Achieved paperless planning & budgeting
The Client
A Major Railway Company in the Middle East. Formed through the merger of two national railway companies, the client is the sole railway operator in the country.
The railway connects the heart of the Arabian peninsula to the Arabian Gulf and to the northern borders of the country via 3650 kilometers of track across three different lines carrying freight and passengers. The client plans to add another 8000 km of track to its network by 2030.
The Challenge
- Lengthy budgeting exercise—which meant the situation at the time of approving the budget was not the same as when the process began.
- Time- and Effort-intensive consolidation of Excel sheets from over 50 departments, leading to lack of time, and less visibility into the progress of each department
- Extra effort needed at the end of the budget cycle to write back the budget into different ERP modules and calculate the carried forward budget amounts from the elapsed year
- Manual/email budget transfers requests and approvals which finance users had to reflect manually on the General Ledger (GL)
The Solution
- Constellation designed the solution using Oracle Hyperion Planning, which allowed for strategic target setting, financial budgeting and forecasting, workforce budgeting and headcount planning, gross margin/revenue planning, expenditure planning, project budgeting, budget execution, funds transfer, budget approvals, workflow, reporting, financial statements generation, and data management for data mapping and enabling integrations with different ERP modules and source systems.
- As part of its solution, Constellation created a centralized planning platform, a single point of truth across the organization. The platform provided a scalable system that allowed for enablement of additional features and enhancements, enhanced governance and control, easy-to-use system interface with task lists, error validations, and task reminders for better decision-making and planning, full system automation, agile and time-efficient processes, responsibility and transparency, and instant reports on the forecasted financial statements.
- In a nutshell: the solution shortened the budget preparation process from three months to a few weeks, linked the budget process with strategic targets, and saved finance users time and effort.
- Fast budget finalization enabled quick response to changing situations, what-if analysis and scenario modelling, budget writeback to ERP on the same day as budget approval, and segregated planning models based on user role.
Outcomes
- Fully-streamlined planning and budgeting process
- Significantly shorter budget cycle
- Full-cycle automation of Planning and Budgeting from Top-Down Planning to Budget Preparation and Approval to Execution
- Fully automated Government Fund Transfer System with completely revamped policies
- Improved accuracy, reliability and transparency in budget fund transfers
- Achieved paperless budgeting thanks to the customized, fully automated workflow