Overhaul of the Budget Planning Application at the LIH

Client Description

The Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) is a public biomedical research institution focused on precision health and committed to becoming a leading reference in Europe for translating scientific excellence into meaningful benefits for patients.

LIH places the patient at the heart of all its activities, driven by a collective obligation to society to use the knowledge and technologies resulting from patient-derived data research to directly impact people’s health. Its dedicated teams of multidisciplinary researchers strive for excellence, generating relevant knowledge related to immune disease and cancer.

The Institute views collaborations, disruptive technologies and process innovation as unique opportunities to improve the application of diagnostics and therapies with the long-term goal of preventing disease.

Main challenges

The finance department of LIH is responsible, among other things, for the budget organization of the entire Research Institute. It was equipped with an old version of the IBM Planning Analytics application that was no longer able to properly support the evolution of processes within the Institute.

As in any financial department, the budget structure is constantly evolving to support operations. It was initially decided to migrate to the next version of Planning Analytics. The LIH worked with the Positive Thinking Company Third Party Application Maintenance team, which was responsible for the migration, as well as for resolving bugs and carrying out minor changes.

After a first period of support for the Institute’s financial department, we noticed that our interventions on fixes or in order to manage exceptions were increasing. It was clear that users were gradually losing autonomy and flexibility. After many discussions with our technical manager and the evaluation of the benefits brought by these specific adaptations with regard to the organization’s expectations, we decide to completely rewrite the application. Thus, we carried out a precise feasibility study and submitted it to the head of the LIH finance department a project to redesign the budget application.

The main challenges were to:

• Redefine the entire budget preparation process
• Integrate the new application with the existing systems (HR, ERP, etc.)
• Ensure the smooth change management with the business users
• Make the application more user-friendly
• Simplify the architecture while integrating the required functionalities

Our approach

In order to meet our client’s needs, we have :

1. Assisted in preparing the project scope (definition of the need) with the business/IT users.
2. Conducted workshops with all the stakeholders, wrote the corresponding specifications (requirements) and defined a schedule and budget estimate.
3. Took over the development of the application in Scrum mode with development and delivery phases per module (four in total). The developed functionalities were iteratively tested by the users, then optimized or adjusted.
4. Supported the LIH teams during the launch phase of the new application by providing them with a dedicated training period.

Benefits

I must say that we are very satisfied with the developed application. First because of its stability, then because of its interfacing capabilities with our systems and finally because of the associated security layer. We can now integrate new processes and adapt the tool to our needs, and not the other way around.

Nancy Bechoux, Finance Manager at LIH

• Significant accuracy gain in forecasting scenarios (budget and forecast) and detailed monitoring.
• Delivery of the budget preparation application within the deadlines originally defined.
• Acceleration and optimization of the budget preparation process with the ability to produce several versions of the budgets during the year.
• Real-time budget tracking for the people affected by changes.
• Successful adoption of the application thanks to the central role played by business users throughout the project.
• Complete and automatic synchronization of information between Planning Analytics, the ERP and the HR systems.
• Development of an application with low maintenance costs (compared to the old version used).
• Use of a reliable and more modern reporting.

Teams involved

A Project Manager, an Expert Consultant on IBM Planning Analytics and a Technical Consultant collaborated with the LIH stakeholders and business teams for nearly 17 weeks.

Technology and Partner

Share

Thanks to our
Author

Ahmed T.