Edgewater Technology performs quarterly rolling forecasts in the Cloud
Edgewater Technology, Inc. is a leading strategic consulting firm that focuses on helping companies drive transformational change that improves processes, reduces costs, and increases revenue. The company’s blend of consulting services and product-based solutions allows it to deliver true end-to-end solutions—from strategy through delivery—to its client base.
Edgewater delivers services through three subsidiaries: Edgewater Consulting, which provides management and technology transformation consulting services; Edgewater Ranzal, an Oracle Platinum Partner with expertise delivering Oracle business analytics solutions; and Edgewater Fullscope, an award-winning Microsoft Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM-for-manufacturing partner.
“Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service reduces our reliance on spreadsheets and puts critical information into the hands of decision-makers. It provides us with in-depth, holistic data from all parts of the business, allowing us to streamline our operational planning process without sacrificing visibility into key operational metrics.”
Business challenges
- Improve accuracy and planning-process flexibility by eliminating multiple spreadsheets circulated among executive management and accounting staff
- Automate annual planning to ensure the process requires less lead time and overall investment by all involved, and that it enables the technology-management consulting firm to focus on its core business instead of managing a time-consuming manual process
- Introduce rigorous scenario planning and other best practices to the planning process with reporting on quarter-over-quarter results and budget scenarios to enable the organization to visualize the impact of its decisions under various operating scenarios for better decision-making
- Shift the planning focus from point-in-time results toward go-forward trends and a longer-range view to analyze profitability and the effect of various operating decisions
- Include more managers in planning and reporting through leveled access to financial information, giving managers more ownership of and accountability for the success of the consulting business
Like many growing companies, we needed more from our spreadsheet-driven annual planning process. Given that our Edgewater Ranzal subsidiary is a full-service Oracle Platinum Partner with expertise in business analytics solutions, and the appeal of a cloud-based suite of planning and budgeting applications, Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service was a natural fit. And, by leveraging an agile development cycle as well as a four-week build cycle, the Oracle solution had a positive impact on our planning process almost immediately.
Results
- Implemented Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service and reduced the risk inherent in working with multiple spreadsheets that required manual consolidation, increasing the accuracy, timeliness, and granularity of planning and reporting intelligence
- Improved decision-making by providing a collaborative forecasting framework that allows Edgewater to align key business drivers with its operating results—enabling the company to supplement its annual planning process with a quarterly, driver-based, rolling-forecast process
- Shifted the organization’s planning objective from a point in time to a long-range view with real-time reports, such as full profit and loss with quarter-over-quarter results and budget scenarios, enabling the company to drill down into key financial and operating metrics (including profitability, average bill rates, and number of billable consultants) that provide insight into performance over time
- Improved forecasting accuracy by enabling management to track trends in key organizational metrics, such as headcount, utilization, and margins, and to integrate operational metrics for Edgewater’s individual operating companies on a monthly basis
- Established accountability for company goals by including more management staff in planning and reporting through secured access that defines roles within the organization for specified views of real-time data