Meat and Livestock Australia Supports Strategic Plans with Oracle EPM Cloud
Meat and Livestock Australia Shortens Planning Cycle by Weeks and Gains Greater Insight into Performance Outcomes with Oracle.
Meat and Livestock Australia Ltd. (MLA) is the marketing, research, and development body for Australia’s red meat and livestock industry. MLA is primarily funded by producer levies along with matched funding from the Australian government and contributions from commercial partners. Its strategic plan is to drive the profitability, sustainability, and global competitiveness of the industry.
Before Oracle, MLA relied on a slew of spreadsheets to prepare budgeting and forecasting reports for various groups of stakeholders. The process was complex and created version control and data accuracy issues. MLA wanted to improve the efficiency and quality of reporting by using a cloud solution to develop planning models for its levy income, reserve modelling, cost allocations, and workforce planning.
“By adopting the powerful and scalable Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, we can easily slice and dice the data and provide a suite of reporting that is specific to individual stakeholders. This flexibility empowered us to deliver value to over 49,000 levy payers and support our strategic plans.”
Business challenges
- Improve the efficiency to create accurate and meaningful reports for external stakeholders, such as Peak Industry Councils and the Commonwealth Government, by using a planning tool to extract and calculate the data from the SAP ERP application without manual manipulation
- Make better decisions on investment priorities by simplifying the process to allocate certain costs in different planning models, such as reserves, overhead, and workforce
- Become more agile in a dynamic operating environment by gaining the ability to easily make changes in reporting hierarchies and map to the new strategic objectives
- Enable the finance team to focus on productive business activities, such as analyzing income trends, rather than spending long hours checking numbers
Why Meat and Livestock Australia Chose Oracle
“Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service represented better value than other vendors. Its out-of-the-box functionality also empowered our finance users to manage the solution without dedicated IT resources.”
—Ben Blinman, Financial Planning and Analysis Manager, Meat and Livestock Australia Ltd.
Results
MLA rolled out Oracle Planning and Budget Cloud Service to develop rolling forecasts and annual budgeting models. Oracle Partner DXC Red Rock provided tools and support to MLA to load reporting hierarchies. It went live with the new platform in five months.
“Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service gives us the flexibility to create all the reporting perspectives on the fly and eliminate the need to call in Hyperion specialists,” Blinman said.
- Shortened the planning cycle by weeks by seamlessly loading data from the SAP ERP system into Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service and providing a single repository to generate accurate and consistent forecast reports for internal and external stakeholders
- Increased agility by implementing rolling forecasts and annual budgeting with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service and enabling the business to easily analyze various scenarios based on multiple dimensions, such as levy rates and animal slaughter volume, and assess the impact on financial outcome
- Delivered value to over 49,000 levy payers by using the SmartView function of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to slice and dice data and create a large suite of reporting that is relevant and specific to individual internal and external stakeholders on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, rather than just a limited set of reports
- Gave confidence to external stakeholders that their levy funds are effectively managed by adopting an integrated suite of data-driven planning models to develop comprehensive rolling forecasts and annual budgeting
- Made it easier and faster to apply separate costs to various planning models by using the powerful business rules’ engine to calculate complex allocation rules and gaining the flexibility to change the reporting hierarchy
- Provided greater transparency to stakeholders on income trends, investments, and performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) via an intuitive suite of quarterly dashboards
- Increased staff productivity by automating management reporting processes and enabling the finance team to focus on high-value activity, such as participating in planning meetings, instead of managing spreadsheets
- Gained new performance management capabilities by centrally storing over 220 annual KPIs and 20 strategic KPIs and empowering the business to capture and track KPI progress, such as completed or in progress, and include non-financial measures in the annual report via the reporting cube
Partners
“Having a local partner to provide ongoing support and strategy is important. The account manager from DXC Red Rock was also very helpful and assisted us in quickly resolving many complex problems and fine tuning our process during the implementation of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service,” Blinman said.