Giraffes at Taronga Zoo, Sydney.
Techwave Australia has leveraged SAP Analytics Cloud to help revitalise Taronga Conservation Society's performance management platform.
The local arm of the US-headquartered SAP integrator was brought in to help revitalised the zoo operator's performance management platform after its functions for budgeting and forecasting had become “arduous”.
Under its legacy system, the zoo operator's strategic decision-making and visibility were limited due to the lack of integration and data availability, which impacted the efficiency of critical tasks such as budgeting, forecasting and revenue planning.
Traditionally, Taronga's budgets were prepared manually by importing data from the S/4 HANA Cloud system and other legacy systems into a Microsoft Excel workbook, which then would be submitted to finance for consolidation, review and approval.
The agreed budget would then be manually loaded into the SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) system. With both the corporate cash flow and business plan generation been Excel-based manual processes, integration was minimal.
However, Techwave worked with Taronga and SAP to address these concerns by streamlining and automating its underlying management processes.
Specifically, Techwave implemented SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to harmonise the financial planning and analysis functions for budgeting and forecasting.
Taronga now claims that the upgrade means the finance team can invest more time conducting critical analyses of the budgets rather than spending time completing onerous manual consolidations.
“The SAC solution provided by Techwave helped streamline the review, approval and submission parts of Taronga's budgeting process,” said Leonard Lek, Taronga's finance manager.
“There were efficiencies gained in the form of reduced manual consolidations and increased accessibility of budget data to cost centre managers in an accurate and timely manner.”
Last year, Taronga enlisted IBM to aid with its conservation efforts, with its pro-bono program Service Corps creating a prototype to measure the impact of changing climates on the critical habitats of threatened species.
