Starlight Children’s Foundation: completing a one-month process in one click

Before Jedox, the Starlight Children’s Foundation team knew it needed a better way to support the finance organization and enable team members who sit outside the direct finance organization to collaborate. Its reporting system relied on Excel, and the team quickly found that it did not have the functionality it needed to support the business. Users found the system hard work. In addition to missing important details, reporting was difficult to understand, with disparate data and complex roll-ups that made analysis challenging. Managing multiple, complex spreadsheets through an onerous, manual process reduced the company’s confidence in their accuracy and became a drain on the team’s time. It was taking the team a full month to produce an allocated budget view of costs per program and hospital. This delay in planning, budgeting, and forecasting compromised the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Wanting to improve its operational efficiency, data-driven decision-making, and planning process, Starlight went on the hunt for an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution that was adaptable and scalable, with high performance. The team selected Jedox because it was easy to use, did not require heavy IT involvement, delivered high performance, and provided a centralized, scalable solution.

Starlight implemented Jedox Cloud to support its business analysis, board reporting, planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Today, a full suite of reporting is carried out with Jedox. Cost centers and program managers can easily see the data they need when they need it, with greater flexibility, which their previous solution lacked. Starlight was able to consolidate financial data quickly and easily from SAP with planning information at a role-based level, with easy access through the Cloud. All users and their permissions are easily managed in a central location, and automatic updates prevent email updates from having to be sent out announcing “a new report is available.”

Once encumbered by a slow, manual process, the team has been able to automate much of the process with Jedox, increasing accuracy and efficiency. “Now we are just flying because we can drill down, drill across, and everyone can see what they are responsible for in the organization,” says Anna Schell, Financial Planning and Analysis Manager at Starlight Children’s Foundation . Instead of taking a full month, a budget view can now be completed automatically through the system. This has reduced reliance on internal resources and freed up the team’s time to focus on more high-value tasks and analysis. And because the planning and budgeting process has been improved, the board only needs to spend 15 minutes on finance.

With Jedox, everyone has a much better picture of the overall financial situation and access to all the details they need. Because of efficiencies gained through the platform, the overall budgeting and planning process has been significantly shortened, and the team has realized an increase in overall accuracy.

Jedox has helped us to have the financial reporting we need at our fingertips – in one place rather than multiple spreadsheets – and this easy access has increased our financial capability and confidence. We can now manage our budget in a much more proactive way, better reflecting the changes throughout the year and allowing us to easily reforecast to ensure we are having the greatest impact for kids, teens, and their families.

Felicity McMahon, Head of Programs at Starlight Children’s Foundation.

In addition to improved efficiency and accuracy, the team has access to crucial functionality to help them answer more detailed questions about the business. With Jedox, the team can easily model detailed workforce planning and program costing without complex spreadsheets, perform “what if” analysis on the data, and complete ad hoc reporting in no time.