Innovation in Business Reporting: SAP Strategy Manager
Local councils work hard to provide the best possible services for their communities, and they have to do this with declining resources. They also have to manage a massive increase in the volume of information about their business activities.
Understanding and monitoring this information is essential to inform any decisions about the allocation of resources. If you don’t know how well you’re performing compared with your objectives, you won’t know what, if any, changes you should be making.
We were working with a council on a change programme aimed at ensuring the best possible
results from its transformation into a unitary authority. It became clear that to achieve its goals, the council needed to overhaul how it controlled, managed and reviewed its performance data.
Its information sources were diverse and incompatible, making it difficult to combine them to
meet local and national performance indicator requirements without significant time-consuming
analysis.
We suggested that the council use SSM so it could tie specific initiatives to its core themes and goals. The system could link all of the council’s activities to ensure the delivery of corporate objectives and at the same time monitor and report instantly on those goals through key performance indicators.
Working together, we defined and built the authority’s needs into the SSM system. We created
strong internal controls so that information owners could be identified easily, ensuring the
accuracy of data inputs.
The authority has been able to close down its legacy performance reporting system and switch
completely to the new SSM system.Importantly, managers have a single, high-level view of business information to improve decisionmaking. Every staff member can see how their contribution, measured by performance indicators, lines up with the authority’s strategic goals and ambitions. Ultimately, the council can make better business decisions about where and how best to use its resources.
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