Enterprise budget and forecast tracking tool
Large scale enterprise tracking of forecast, budget and actual data across many entities and hundreds of financial coordinators is highly specialised. We developed GMR to allow.
⚙ User Base
100s
⚙ Complexity
High
⚙ Timeline
1 Year+
⚙ Specialists
4
⚙ Industry
Mining
User Base
100s
Complexity
High
Timeline
1 Year+
Specialists
4
Industry
Mining
Enterprise budget and forecast tracking tool
Large scale enterprise tracking of forecast, budget and actual data across many entities and hundreds of financial coordinators is highly specialised. We developed GMR to allow.
- User base: 100s
- Complexity: High
- Timeline: 1 Year+
- Specialists: 4
Industry: Mining
Requirement
Our large mining client had a legacy Excel budget and forecasting system that had reached its end of life for a number of key reasons, It could no longer handle the large increases in the volume of data/users, it performed badly in day to day operation and it crashed constantly causing constant rework and some data loss.
Continuing the use of the legacy system introduce unacceptable risk to their budget and forecasting management and reporting.
Solution
We assessed that Excel was not well suited for handling over 100+ financial staff’s daily input of budget, forecast and actual spend information spread across a large number of complex macro based Excel workbooks (many spreadsheets per mine). Time consuming and complex human processes, file versioning issues, data corruption and slowness of generating reports all needed addressing.
Our team designed a solution to shift data storage and multi-user functionality away from Excel into technology better suited for that purpose whilst still maintaining the use of Excel for its spreadsheet functionality. Keeping Excel was important as it avoided the need to do mass scale retraining and ensured that flexibility of creating multiple spreadsheets was maintained.
The solution consisted of a:
Clustered SQL Server environment for data storage of all the financial data .
A C# sophisticated middleware capability to perform high speed calculations, version control, user management and access and template and snapshot management for complex calculations and access control.
A comprehensive C# based Excel Add-In to interface with the middleware so that all data was kept centrally and all calculations, routines and process were standardised.
The new system is full operational and has been used over many annual financial reporting periods. It has removed the risks of the legacy system and provided many improvements that were otherwise impossible in Excel, for example access control, snapshot management, multiple versions of a budget.
Tech
C#
.Net
VSTO (Excel), Excel VBA
SQL Server
IIS (REST API)
Windows Servers
Our client’s feedback
iMSX ensured that our scope was clearly understood, technically achievable, made recommendations for improvements and provided an delivery estimate that met our needs. During the development process, the capability of iMSX was tested through a number of scope changes by us. On every occasion, innovative and functional solutions were offered. iMSX delivered a product that exceeded our initial scope requirements on time and on budget.
Now that the system is in steady state use, our relationship with iMSX has been continued via an ongoing support agreement. I value to the contribution made to our business by Clive and the team at iMSX.
