Expenses Control with Business Intelligence

Our client, a major global chemical manufacturer, was facing a problem in the Information Technology division due to poor expense management. There was too much data with no order. Management was not sure if they could trust the data because there was no consistency: one day the numbers shown were one and the next day they were another.

Management needed monthly reports where they could compare actual data against last year and budget. In addition, they needed to generate forecasts to visualize the trend for the coming year.

IT relied on contractors for part of its services, so vendor spend was also an important metric, as it represented variable costs.

All this information was essential to anticipate or detect problems and solve them in time. In addition, the budget was based on it.

Our team partnered with IT to work on the solution, and applying our Six Sigma methodology, we identified that there was one main opportunity: they needed a tool that could integrate all the data easily and could offer management different ways to segment it. The source of accurate data was SAP.

Our team of experts developed a dashboard in Power BI that made the expense data visual, integrated and accurate. The data is updated every month, after month-end close, so the data does not contain differences against reality. Different charts were published to cover different types of comparisons. Management can now easily obtain data for decision making, as they have confidence in it.