Management Report in PS style

Client : Leading US international retailer with strong ASEAN presence

The ASEAN business head contacted PS to perform monthly reporting and business analytics for five countries for a period of six months. A task driven by the global roll-out of a new corporate report that emerged from its US head office. The implementation of which required additional resources as whilst lots of data and information were available within the individual ASEAN entities, legacy IT issues limited the opportunities for cost-effective automation and as a result, significant volumes of data would need to be manually extracted.

During the initial analysis phase, PS quickly recognised that whilst some of the underlying data was directly relevant, other elements required data cleansing, which included data adjustment or re-alignment. This would then allow the data to be captured within a single database and in doing so, could be reflected in the new report in a systematic and timely manner, thereby meeting the tight reporting deadline.

PS performed the data cleansing, re-alignment and adjustment whenever required. And when faced with the challenge of extracting prior year information with incompatibility issues, PS built a methodology to re-compute the data – something that demanded key stakeholder buy-in. To enhance the process, we also designed and created formulate-driven templates to enable data to be extracted with minimal human intervention and judgement. PS was also tasked to be the facilitator in monthly meetings with ASEAN finance and operational teams.

Over the implementation period, it was encouraging to see the operational teams becaming highly analytical as they linked operational initiatives to financial performance. At the end of the 6- month project, the reporting process with its embedded intelligent analytics was able to be completed within just 1 week of financial closing.

Within this challenging project, PS focused on providing flexible resource to handle data cleansing and template testing, the most time-consuming aspect of implementing the new reporting processes; thereby enabling the in-house teams to concentrate on enhancing the internal metrics and learning the mechanics of the new reporting tasks. The other benefit of engaging PS stemmed from its role as an objective facilitator who engages with the finance and operational teams with clear objectives and open-mindedness – this goes a long way towards helping to create professional performance analytics.

At PS, we believe this is the way management reporting should be.