Robo’s client is a large US Federal Government Agency responsible for the financial consolidation of financial statements for all federal agencies in order to generate and publish the annual Financial Report for the United States Government.  To fulfil the mandate of the agency, the team at the Financial and Budgetary Reports Division must be able to effectively collate audited and consolidated financial statements, notes and other financial information received from all federal government departments and agencies via two customized Oracle-based systems and then, upload the data into two IBM reporting applications for use in the preparation of the United States Government Financial Report (FR) which is due at the desk of the President and Congress at a specified date each year without fail.

Due to the increasing number of federal agencies reporting, the complexities of the reporting requirements and the business processes used in the collation and generation of the financial data, the Agency was experiencing a variety of challenges in the consolidation process as it couldn’t adequately perform the tasks required in the amount of time allocated for the collation, generation and publication of the Financial Report without placing a lot of strain on its staff each year.  Robo was hired to provide Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) consulting expertise that would generate comprehensive and leading practice solutions to enhance the current processes and systems for collating the financial data received from all agencies for the generation and publishing of the Financial Report (FR) thus, addressing all gaps the Agency was experiencing.  The stakeholders that our team worked closely with were distributed across three cities in three different states.

To start, we conducted a current state assessment to understand and define the current processes (using process flows), systems and pain-points and then, using our findings from the current state assessment, we worked collaboratively with the client stakeholders to define a future state and identify the gaps.  Finally, we implemented the agreed future state changes and executed the change management plans.

The project involved the analysis of business processes to streamline and eliminate redundant or inefficient points in the process, implementation of design changes to two existing mission-critical reporting applications to optimize their architecture and configuration in order to exponentially reduce runtime for business scripts from hours to minutes.  Tactical execution of an effective program management methodology was applied to ensure that the technical and functional objectives of the project were accomplished on time and to stakeholders' satisfaction.  Steadfast execution and delivery were essential because the Financial Report (FR) was a high visibility document that ends up on the desk of the President, Treasury Secretary, members of Congress and other key government personnel hence, the timeline for the completion and submission of the report was unwavering.  Working with key stakeholders located across three cities and states was an added complexity factor as effective coordination and collaboration with these individuals was critical to completion of the daily tasks required at the various phases of the project.

At conclusion of the project, the client was able to realize the following benefits:

• Exponential reduction in the cycle time required for the entire process allowing for added analysis of the data by stakeholders prior to submission
• Simplification of the FR generation process and the introduction of continuous improvement techniques
• Decrease in manual activities, increase in automation and reduction in user-defined workarounds
• Ability to respond to Auditor’s request in a timely and acceptable manner
• Reporting application security model and administration meet all compliance requirements from oversight agencies
• Agency personnel skills were leveraged on more value-added activities
• Enabled flexibility for changing environment and propensity to respond quickly future requests from oversight and/or customer agencies

Entire duration including the transition period was 14 months.  With all the challenges experienced, the project was still completed on time, on budget and to the satisfaction of the client.  Throughout the course of this project, the two most important success factors were the amount of vested interest the client personnel  had in the success of the project coupled with the extent to which the agency collaborated with our firm and supported our staff.