Item: Board
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Board is being used extensively within the finance team to manage all reporting, quarterly budgeting, and to enable the monthly balance sheet reconciliation process.
Board also allows the creation of dashboards for each level of the business from business unit manager up to executive. This enables the sharing of information and financial results immediately. Each executive within the business has a dashboard to manage their own individual KPI's.
The security flexibility within the system allows you to create multi levels of access to ensure the right people have access to relevant data.

Pros and Cons

Allows business unit managers see their results when they are live.
Allows drilldown capability and full transparency into all revenue and costs.
Enables the business to make decisions on relevant and live data.
Board is a one-stop shop for all data points within the organisation.

Transitioning to Board 11 has taken time.
The column nature of the structure in Board can limit flexibility if you are recreating old reports. However, this gives you a blank slate to create new Board reports.
The overnight load from the systems into Board can sometimes fail. This is likely to do with the amount of data we are loading every night.

Return on Investment

Allowed to reduce our largest cost and therefore increase EBITDA.
Enables scenario modelling to identify the most effective use of capital.
Very transparent and robust budgeting process.
Excellent daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly management reporting.

Alternatives Considered

IBM Cognos Analytics and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)

The integration plan for Board was far easier and more comprehensive from a data security and data management perspective. The integration team had the help and support of the Board team as well as a third party team to enable smooth integration.
Also, cost was a key issue and Board was the most competitive.

Other Software Used

AiM, iCareManager

Likelihood to Recommend

Having conversations with business unit managers about their financial performance. When I started at my current company, we finished my first month end process for May on the 23rd of June. This is far too late to be having meaningful discussions with the business unit managers about financial performance. Board has enabled process improvement to help us achieve a 4-day month-end turnaround. This means the business unit managers are seeing their live financials on the 5th day of the month, giving them ample time to address poor financial performance.

Labour costs account for 70% of our revenue, a typical problem in Australia. We have created a labour cube within Board to drive a daily variance analysis on our labour. This allows the finance team to have daily discussions with business unit managers who are overspending. This has been a quantum leap forward for our business and has enabled the business to manage the largest cost quiet effectively.

I am yet to find a situation where Board cannot manage a specific problem. The ability to link data and bring the correlations of the data points together within the system has been a game changer for me for my own professional development, and for the business

Board - reporting, budgeting and effective data sharing instantly

Overall Satisfaction with Board