Management control

Limit financial risks

The process objective: to monitor the financial data of 200 agencies across Europe

Financial management is a strategic point for companies, and the toolkit that supports the financial teams must allow optimal monitoring of budgets, otherwise there is a risk of making the wrong decisions.

Consider a transport company that collects financial data from more than 200 agencies across Europe. Today, the group’s teams are working with a standardized Excel file that brings together the “useful” data for European management control managers. Unfortunately, the Excel file is not always sent in time, the data entered is not always correct and there are no common indicators at the European level.

The Europe unit therefore wanted to use Iterop to move all the data from its agencies back to the Europe hub, in order to monitor the agencies and quickly identify the “health status” of the transport centers.

The following is an example of a workflow for this type of case.

What does the process consist of?

• From an Excel table template, the group’s agencies fill in the financial data for the week (turnover, result, forecast, etc.) as they used to do before.
• Every Monday, the management controller – the supervisor responsible for forwarding the data – sends the Excel file in Iterop. Iterop’s role is to browse the data to verify that everything is complete and then send the file on time to the Europe manager. This is the “technical” validation.
• If the file is not submitted by Wednesday, an alert is automatically sent to the agency that’s late.
  When the file is checked, it is then automatically sent to a Dropbox with automatic folder organization.
• A “human” validation task requires the Europe management controller to verify the data with a link to the Dropbox. If the data is incorrect, the file is returned to the agency.
• The Europe controller manages all of its data with the Iterop dashboards and can send a weekly report to the management team thanks to the export capabilities offered.

To avoid using Excel, key data can be entered directly into Iterop with information enhanced along the way through business repositories. In addition, it’s much simpler to update the data, and the indicators can be generated directly in the Iterop dashboards.

Possible connectors:

• DMS: Dropbox, Google, Alfresco… many DMS exist to dynamically manage all documents navigated in a workflow. Iterop can connect to most existing DMS.
• BDD: It’s possible to connect Iterop to an SQL database, but the use of business repositories could largely cover your needs.
• KPI: There are different tools to generate metrics from existing data. However, the dashboards and KPI capabilities built into Iterop are powerful enough to let you make the right decisions.