Mondelio give ACE the upper hand

 

Facts in Brief

Company Profile

Australian Communication Exchange (ACE) is a not-for-profit, Australian organisation which operates the National Relay Exchange to facilitate access to telecommunication for those who are deaf or have a hearing, speech or communication impairment.

ACE has call centres in Brisbane and Melbourne and has been in operation for more than eight years.

The Challenge

ACE was relying on an inadequate, off the shelf solution for its budgeting and had expanded to a degree that it needed sophisticated financial modelling capability to aid in managing budgets, restructuring billing and negotiating for contracts and enterprise bargaining.

The Solution

Mondelio is software for building row and column (matrix) based modelling and reporting applications for budgeting, analysis and forecasting. It creates applications that functionally encapsulate the tasks of four commercial products – spreadsheets, databases, macros and reporting software, with superior performance and capabilities.

Business Benefits

  • Higher productivity
  • Greater accuracy
  • Cost savings

Company Profile

ACE has achieved a competitive advantage in tendering for government contracts as a result of their use of leading corporate modelling solution, Mondelio.

ACE, a not-for-profit organisation under contract to the Australian Government, operates the National Relay Service which enables people with a hearing or speech impairment to access telecommunications services by acting as a third party in telephone calls, converting voice to text and text to voice.

Mondelio, a revolutionary corporate modelling solution that is changing the way medium and large organisations manage their future, has given ACE the upper hand by creating major efficiencies and cost savings in their enterprise bargaining and tendering processes.

Mondelio is a single, integrated solution that is used to develop and manage budgets, run feasibility studies and provide detailed reporting and forecasting.

Mondelio supersedes spreadsheets and OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) tools. Its power lies in its automation and ability to utilise historical data to manage both the past and the future in one software solution.

The Challenge

ACE had outgrown the off-the-shelf product it was using for budgeting and needed corporate modelling capability to aid its contract negotiation and budgeting at an advanced level.

“Our contractual negotiations with the Australian Government have a very high level of accountability built into this process. It is important that we achieve our targets,” ACE Financial Controller, Mr Peter Jones said.

“Our contract and financial performance is reviewed every year so we need to make sure our forecasting and reporting is leading edge.”

The off-the-shelf system did not allow ACE to delve into specifics in its budgeting process, nor approach its budgeting from an activities perspective. This left the organisation without a yardstick for comparing intended to actual expenditure.

“We needed our divisional managers to be able to build plans that defined specific activities so they could be recorded in the modelling system and we could match actuals against them,” Mr Jones said.

“In the previous system we had to summarise and go by rule of thumb rather than get down to detail. For example, ACE’s wages were modelled in spreadsheets and summarised to a single figure before they could be input to the modelling system.

ACE also wanted to upgrade the security of access to its budgeting system which is used by divisional managers and their staff.

“It was a specific requirement that we had good security and could gain strong control over templates that people used for their budgets,” Mr Jones said.

ACE also required its budgeting software to make allowance for depreciation and manage capital expenditure. “We have a lot of communications and IT equipment. We needed a system which could accurately forecast depreciation without trying to manage each individual asset in the budgeting software,” Mr Jones said.

“When we bid for a five-year contract we have to do a lot of crystal ball gazing. That’s not easy when you’ve got a lot of IT capital expenditure that needs to be turned over and isn’t going to last five years.”

ACE also needed to bring its human resources division into the modelling system to create an accurate picture of HR with separate awards and enterprise agreements taken into account.


The Process

Mr Jones spent several years seeking the ideal modelling and financial system for ACE.

“I found there were two types of products available – the very high end which was way over the top and extremely customised and the low end that lacked detail and flexibility.”

“Eventually I found Mondelio and I developed a level of comfort with the solutions they offered.”


The Solution

ACE implemented the Mondelio corporate modelling solution in 2000 and spent nine months customising it.

During that time, ACE’s existing telecommunications billing contractor ceased to provide their services. A second out-sourced solution was unsuccessful.

However, Mondelio’s in-house development team was able to customise the product platform to allow ACE to bring their billing in-house, saving nearly $50,000 every year.

ACE’s use of Mondelio in HR forecasting has significantly improved the process of negotiating enterprise agreements (EBs) with call centre staff.

“We modelled the financial aspects of our enterprise agreements into Mondelio. This provides major efficiencies when we come to renegotiate these agreements with our employees,” Mr Jones said.

“When we receive a log of claims it’s far less time consuming for us using Mondelio to see exactly what the financial impact will be on the company.

“We can do that in a matter of minutes rather than the hours it would have taken us using spreadsheets.”

ACE has also enjoyed efficiency gains in the budgeting process which takes place twice a year in the form of an annual budget and a major mid year revision.

“It used to be a mammoth task and we’ve saved weeks rather than hours by using Mondelio,” Mr Jones said.

“Once the divisional managers had submitted their budget spreadsheets we would take three or four weeks to correlate them and fix all the problems with them. Now using Mondelio we have a reasonable final draft completed in about a week.”

The implementation also gave ACE greater security throughout the budgeting process.

“Divisional heads prepare their budgets by directly accessing Mondelio – the security gives them access to their division only – and we can also restrict assess during the final adjustments and approvals stage thus minimising the possibility of any unapproved final adjustments or other errors,” Mr Jones said.

Mondelio has helped ACE trim any drain on its operating budget and become highly efficient for a competitive advantage when negotiating major contracts. “We have to stay as lean as we can as there will be others competing for the tender when it is run in 2006,” Mr Jones said.

“Anything that allows us to reduce the number of staff we have or provides us with greater accuracy so we achieve our target is a distinct advantage for us.”


Business Benefits

ACE has made significant efficiency gains using Mondelio, particularly in the areas of preparing the annual and revised budgets and in negotiating enterprise bargaining agreements and other contracts. At least four weeks of number crunching has been alleviated each year.

Mr Jones said Mondelio had given ACE greater productivity with no increase in staff levels.

It is Mondelio’s accuracy in modelling that has allowed ACE to enter into negotiations for enterprise bargaining and for government contracts from a more informed position.

“Our contract negotiations are complex and involve considerations of a number of scenarios and proposals developed by both parties. We’ve been able to change Mondelio on the fly so we know exactly what the financial impact of these proposals will be with a high degree of accuracy,” Mr Jones said.

“Using Mondelio we’ve been able to drill deep into our cost structures and gain an accurate analysis of our key financial drivers.”

ACE has saved nearly $50,000 each year by bringing billing in-house, which has also given them greater control over all aspects of their operation.

“That cost saving means a lot to a not-for-profit organisation because we need to make sure we avoid any waste and make the maximum possible use of our funding,” Mr Jones said.

  Please click here to see the video by Peter Jones, ACE Financial Controller, relaying his experience with the business modelling solution.

Contact

Learn why thousands of users rely on Mondelio CPM to manage and optimise their business planning and reporting processes. Call us on 1300 851 260 or email us at info@mondelio.com

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