Government Agency Modernizes Financial Processes with Seamless Transformation

Challenge

A large US federal agency with a multibillion-dollar budget was looking to improve their financial systems capabilities by automating their budget formulation, planning, and execution processes. The primary goal of this modernization project was to increase the accessibility of budgetary and financial information to enhance reporting, decision-making, accountability, and transparency.

Compliance with emerging financial governance regulations was a key driver for this massive project spanning four environments and 25 Oracle applications with impacts on budget execution, acquisition, travel, purchase cards, contracts, vacancy planning, formulation, operations planning, human resources, and payroll management.

The challenges the agency wanted to address included:

Manual processes — Prior to the modernization project, many of the agency’s processes were manual. For example, the agency manually reconciled cardholder statements and records and pulled budgetary report data. This created backlogs and delays in accessing data and kept decision-makers from having the information needed to make data-driven, agile decisions.

Lack of visibility — There was little data availability or flexibility in tracking departmental budgets or making changes throughout the year. Budgetary information was centralized and required support to access. Departments struggled to make informed decisions or pivot their strategy.

Continuity — With a project of this scope at a large agency, continuity during the transition was crucial. They needed a partner who had experience managing Oracle modernization projects without affecting an organization’s business goals.

Solutions

Guidehouse supported this large-scale modernization project through its Oracle strategic technology alliance. As an Oracle partner for more than 10 years, the firm brings a track record of delivering successful enterprise-wide Oracle projects.

Guidehouse provided consulting, solutions delivery, implementation management, and transition support focused on modernizing financial operations, removing time-consuming manual processes, and allowing for an end-to-end integration of budget process. This includes development of a solution that leveraged the Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle EPM (Hyperion), UiPath, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to modernize and digitalize the agency’s financial and budgetary processes.

Guidehouse’s proficiency in Oracle enterprise performance management and extensive experience managing Oracle modernization projects of all sizes enabled the project team to strategically plan the agency’s implementation and add the configurations needed to achieve its business goals.

The project was structured over a nine-month period to avoid affecting key business milestones. Modernizing environments one by one and focusing on operational continuity ensured the agency could meet all federally required budget cycle timelines.

The project sought to achieve the following goals:

• Creating a single source of truth for budget operations
• Decentralizing payroll and operations data
• Developing an end-to-end budget process with formulation through execution
• Integrating with multiple enterprise systems
• Ensuring traceability across the process
• Developing an aligned system for the budget process

Impact

Guidehouse’s successful management of the federal agency’s transition project enabled adoption of a new financial management platform that integrated budget, performance, and strategic planning without disruptions to business processes. Guidehouse led full life cycle implementation of Oracle products to facilitate and streamline 50+ business processes (acquisition, payroll, travel, and P-card etc.) for over 3,000 users across the agency.

Budget Planning

• Modernized how users submit, collaborate, and review budget requests
• Created automated checks to limit categorical and overall spending, eliminating the need for manual checks
• Created a standardized approvals workflow with a verifiable audit trail
• Implemented complex forecasting models with advanced analytics that check for compliance and prescribe distribution adjustments

Budget Execution

• Created transparency around real-time office spending by category for better end-of-year projections and more spending flexibility
• Implemented placeholder modifications to allow for reserving current-year funds, minimizing prior-year requests
• Increased data transparency between the budget planning and budget execution teams, allowing for better planning

Payroll Management

• Decentralized payroll control, allowing officers to take ownership of their payroll budgets
• Provided tools to see and estimate budget, projected spending, and costs in relation to all planned payroll actions
• Implemented a personnel planning method based on budget, not headcount

Purchase Card Management

• Automated reconciliation between entries and statements powered by predictive analytics
• Enabled full oversight over transactions and spending patterns to identify improper spending faster
• Reducing audit exposure and improving audit compliance

Acquisitions

• Linked interagency agreements (IAA) to IAA submissions
• Made acquisitions information readily accessible
• Provided multiple reports and executive dashboards that enables tracking, monitoring and decision making

Funding Transfers

• Improved awareness of payroll and operating budget amounts for easier transfer requests and approvals
• Established processes to submit, review, and approve office budget transfer requests

Data Calls

• Drastically reduced exchange of ad hoc requests and sharing of spreadsheets
• Enabled access to all budgetary and acquisitions data 24/7

Data Visualization

• Provided multiple automated dashboards and reports summarizing budgetary and acquisition activities

Automation

Guidehouse has implemented robotic process automation (RPA) to reduce manual activities and increase efficiency and data accuracy by enabling automated entry of the transactions (obligations) into the Oracle ERP platform. This led to a significant reduction in manual effort and reduces the manual errors and improved financial reconciliation.

These transformations had the following key overarching impacts:

• Improved operational efficiencies — Upgrading the agency’s budget planning, budget execution, and resource planning business processes and tools generated increased accuracy, efficiency, and value.
• Digitized and streamlined formerly manual processes — Cutting down on manual work and leveraging automation freed up workforce capacity. Digitizing processes increased transparency across the enterprise, allowing for more data-driven planning.
• Reduced costs — Streamlining processes across the organization significantly reduced infrastructure and operational costs while improving workforce efficiency.
• Improved compliance, security, and control — The project enabled increased accountability and ease of reporting with customizable dashboards and reports, resulting in more informed and data-driven decisions and improved visibility.
• Built a foundation for future modernization projects — This large-scale implementation project established processes and frameworks the agency will use to implement future planned transformation projects.

Guidehouse’s success in helping clients complete large modernization projects such as this comes from our extensive understanding of Oracle enterprise solutions, as well as our industry knowledge. Our deep bench of combined technology and enterprise expertise enables us to customize solutions for clients to achieve both their IT and business goals.

Need help with modernizing your organization’s financial processes? Contact us to learn more about our Oracle strategic technology alliance.