Financial Controlling for a Major Swiss Construction Project
Learn how a leading Swiss construction company boosted their financial mangement on a 500 million CHF, 10 year infrastructure project.
Discover how Aposphere collaborated with a leading Swiss construction company to overhaul its financial controlling processes for a 500 million CHF, 10-year infrastructure project.
By addressing inefficiencies caused by fragmented tools and manual workflows, Aposphere implemented an operational layer based on IBM Planning Analytics.
The solution provides interactive and structured financial views, streamlined data integration, and enabled collaborative decision-making. Delivered within six months, this scalable platform sets a new standard for financial management in the construction industry.
Starting Point
The client's financial processes rely on diverse tools, including Baubit for detailed calculations, Navision as ERP, a financial data warehouse under development, and MicroStrategy for reporting. This setup led to fragmented workflows and challenges with data consistency.
Many tasks were performed in Excel, increasing the risk of errors and inefficiency. Excel struggled to handle the complexity and volume of the project's financial data. Poor connectivity between tools resulted in cumbersome data transfers and limited functionality.
The project was initiated under a tight timeline, with six months to deliver a functional solution while aligning with parallel developments in the client's financial data warehouse.
Aposphere's Approach
To address the client's challenges, we implemented a comprehensive, phased strategy that ensured both rapid delivery and seamless integration with existing tools and workflows.
The result is the implementation of a new operation layer for controlling in a pilot project, with its scalable architecture allowing the scaling to other projects within the company.
Architectural Analysis
We conducted a detailed review of the existing tool landscape and upcoming developments. This analysis highlighted critical integration gaps and confirmed the need for a robust, interactive controlling layer to bridge the systems.
Operation Layer Implementation
Leveraging IBM Planning Analytics, we developed a financial controlling platform designed for structured, collaborative management. Key features include:
- Planned income statement: A comprehensive view of projected financial outcomes.
- Financial plan: A detailed, interactive planning tool.
These tools enable teams to collaborate in real time, significantly improving performance and accuracy.
System Integration
The operational layer is seamlessly integrated with the base tools (BauBit, Navision) and the dashboarding layer (MicroStrategy) to enable efficient reporting while ensuring compatibility with the financial data warehouse, acting as single source of truth and being developed simultaneously by the client. This approach ensures a cohesive ecosystem for financial data management.
The Solution
Our solution focuses on delivering a scalable, high-performing, and integrated operational architecture, complemented by an intuitive frontend and key functionalities such as real-time collaboration, data-driven insights, and streamlined workflows to enhance financial controlling processes.
Architecture
Our solution implements the operation layer in a typical multi-layer technology stack, playing a pivotal role in the seamless functioning of the ecosystem.
The base layer consists of different specific tools, here the Baubit PRO software used for the construction-specific calculations, and a Microsoft Navision ERP storing the accounting data.
A finance data warehouse (DWH) preprocesses the raw data through different layers up to the "Gold Layer", being the central source of truth in the entreprise architecture. Our controlling solution therefore gets preprocessed base-layer data from this DWH and writes back the final controlling views which will then be consumed by the MicroStrategy BI layer.
Our solution implements the previously missing operational layer, which is the crucial part for seamless data flow. Thus, compatibility is ensured, manual interventions are reduced, and the controllers are provided with a fully interactive environment for analysis and planning.
Key Features
The solution is designed to address the client's challenges effectively while optimizing financial controlling. Key highlights include:
Interactive Financial Planning
The flexible and scalable solution helps the controller work towards standard tools such as planned income statement and financial plan. Teams can collaborate in real time and work with structured, accurate data.
Data Integration
Data is automatically loaded from the base systems and exported for reporting. Data processing to reach the different controlling views is largely automated yet fully configurable, minimizing errors and improving efficiency.
Performance Optimisation
The unique data storage technology of IBM Planning Analytics allows real-time analysis and processing of the large data volumes in play.
Controlling Views
Together with the client, we used the powerful engine provided by IBM Planning Analytics to implement tools responding to the immediate challenges, however, the framework is highly scalable to accommodate future financial management needs.
Planned Income Statement
The planned income statement is a financial tool used to estimate an organisation's income and expenses over a specific period.
For such large construction projects, a dynamic and adaptable framework is needed to help project and analyze expected income and expenses in real time and over the whole project duration.
Financial Plan
A financial plan is a critical tool for ensuring liquidity by forecasting cash flows and identifying potential shortfalls.
The financial plan we implemented for our client is a detailed and interactive tool that enables granular budgeting and forecasting. It allows teams to create precise financial projections, align budgets, adapt plans based on real-time insights, and maintain financial stability.
Project Results
This project delivered tangible benefits for the client, addressing inefficiencies and setting a benchmark for future financial management systems.
Efficiency Gains
Manual, Excel-based workflows are replaced with a structured and automated system, reducing errors and saving time.
Improved Collaboration
Teams can now work interactively within the operational layer, fostering better alignment and decision-making.
Enhanced Reporting
Automated data sharing with MicroStrategy provides seamless, up-to-date reporting capabilities, without compromise to the operability of the controlling layer.
Rapid Delivery
The operational solution was successfully implemented within six months, meeting tight project deadlines and aligning with the parallel development of the data warehouse.
This use case describes an actual customer project, however, no names are mentioned.