Douglas Partners’ wanted to change their routine and basic annual budgeting function to a process that would drive transparency and accountability. They implemented Workday Adaptive Planning with QMetrix, and lifted business planning to the next level – here’s how.
Douglas Partners provides integrated practical solutions for projects across Geotechnical, Environment, Groundwater, Rock Mechanics, Geophysics and Materials Testing. They deliver practical solutions for projects where the built environment interacts with the ground. Douglas Partners has 600 staff across 19 locations. They have run more than 130,000 projects across Australia and Papau New Guinea over the last 60 years.
Context: Wanting to take a basic budgeting function to the next level
Douglas Partners is a long running professional services business providing engineering expertise. In recent years, it has been on a journey of change to adopt better systems and processes to ultimately serve their clients and stakeholders better.
Within finance, a key area for potential improvement was taking a routine and basic annual budgeting function of little value, and turning it into a process to drive transparency and accountability, and to impact the bottom line positively.
As a diverse business, every project they work on has its nuances; projects can range from a week to multiple years, and every client has different requirements.
It can be tricky to model such a complicated business into a flexible and useful budget that is also transparent and aspirational. While Excel was able to serve the purpose to an extent, the spreadsheet-based process took a long time and was hard to manage. There were multiple workbooks open at one time and whenever a single driver had to be changed, they needed to refresh several tables and then manually check that everything had updated.
During meetings, management would request a change – but it would take the finance team up to a day to update before coming back with results. It was very time consuming and prone to error. Due to this lengthy, laborious process, there was only enough time to prepare and consolidate budgets.
However, Douglas Partners wanted to take business planning to the next level – to analyse projections, get real insights, and run various scenarios. Equally important, they needed to reforecast regularly without the constraints of a spreadsheet based process.
The solution: A better FP&A system delivering stronger business capabilities
Douglas Partners chose Workday Adaptive Planning as their Financial Planning and Analysis technology solution and QMetrix as their trusted implementation partner.
Integrating systems and gaining efficiencies
To undertake reporting and analysis, the finance team needed to download data from their Vantagepoint ERP, and cleanse, manipulate and consolidate it in spreadsheets.
With integration to Adaptive Planning, the finance team can refresh reports in minutes, bypassing several manual steps, and simplifying the process substantially. From a revenue and cost planning perspective, every cost centre, line item and employee is linked and they are all accounted for. Changes made to key drivers ripple through all aspects of the plan instantaneously.
This has also made it easier to manage people and projects. Firstly, because everything is in Adaptive Planning, nothing goes missing or unexplained. Secondly, because everything is connected, it is easier to bring through every engineer and project rate to generate planned revenue, account for seasonality and to understand profitability.
Shifting the role of finance – from number crunchers to business partners
Being able to provide these insights has been a great value-add for the business. Tania Amalen, Finance Manager Douglas Partners, says, “There has been a complete shift. Our senior management team can now see the power of information, insights and analysis – and they want more of it. And we were able to do it because we have Workday Adaptive Planning.”
Although the FP&A team is small, they are far better placed to partner with the business by spending less time on manual activities.
“Finance has now evolved from being passive observers to driving analysis and insights with branch managers and executives. With Adaptive Planning, the labour intensive aspects of the budget process are taken care of, giving us so much more time to do value-adding work.
We can now better align our financials to our strategic objectives. We are able to work more efficiently, tasks are so much easier and the team is more motivated.
Having Adaptive Planning has helped us have far richer conversations with managers. The company’s financial literacy has grown and they see how finance can drive a culture of accountability, transparency and ownership”.
– Tania Amalen, Finance Manager
Changing conversations – richer and more meaningful
Douglas Partners now has a quarterly forecasting discipline, and the finance team uses this as an opportunity to collaborate closely with stakeholders.
Together, they can view changes in real time and make immediate decisions. Management can ask, “What is the impact if we drop revenue by 5% or change pricing by 10%?” And the finance team can quickly show how these scenarios affect the bottom line, where potential problems might lie, or highlight areas for further review and consideration. They can identify and investigate gaps in performance, and how to address issues in a timely manner.
Bringing the team along for the journey – both the office of finance and engineers
Most engineers love graphs and charts, and when done well, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. Converting financial metrics into visual graphs help branch managers understand how things will impact them, or what would happen if certain actions were taken or not.
Adaptive Planning’s OfficeConnect, which provides integration with Excel, enabled reports and dashboards to be easily prepared and presented.
Furthermore, planning data flows through to Power BI which provides operational metrics and dashboards. Adaptive Planning connected seamlessly with upstream and downstream systems with the help of QMetrix’s data integration specialists.
The team has found Adaptive Planning intuitive to pick up. Tania says, “Finance people are good with Excel – and the usability of Adaptive Planning made it easy to make the transition. It was able to accommodate the complexity of our business, and we are able to configure and run reports ourselves”.
An able and expert implementation partner
Throughout this process, QMetrix has been Douglas Partners’ implementation partner and are continuing to roll out further capability to maximise Adaptive Planning’s value to the business. When asked about her experience, Tania says, “The business had many requests when implementing Adaptive Planning, including a complicated allocations model.”
“QMetrix always found a way to deliver on our more sophisticated requirements, and they did it with patience and tact. They were always available and took the initiative to help when needed. They have a lot of experience and know best practice, and would suggest better ways we could do things. I’ve really appreciated their expertise”.
– Tania Amalen, Finance Manager
Impact for Douglas Partners
Douglas Partners’ drew on QMetrix’s Financial Planning and Analysis expertise
We empower your finance team to move beyond the “spreadsheet trap” and evolve into true strategic partners. Get a reliable source of timely data and accurate forward-looking analysis capabilities.
Accelerate your FP&A with Workday Adaptive Planning
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Download a PDF version of the Douglas Partners’ case study.
