Introduction
The New York State Insurance Fund (NYSIF) is a governmental insurance carrier that provides worker’s compensation and disability benefits for employers in New York State. NYSIF is financially self-supporting and competes with private insurance carriers to ensure a fair marketplace and to be a guaranteed source of coverage for employers who cannot secure coverage elsewhere. With 2,000+ employees, it is the largest provider of worker’s compensation insurance in the state of New York and among the top ten largest in the nation. For more information on NYSIF, visit their website.
Challenges
Previously, NYSIF employed a spreadsheet-driven budgeting process that lacked security and was prone to error. This manual system presented several challenges, including:
- Inconsistent mapping of data from year to year
- Complexities due to mapping that relied on two to three different dimensions
- Changes to data values in spreadsheets not pushed to the general ledger
- Irregularities in source system data left uncorrected
- New accounting combinations not relayed to the budgeting team, resulting in time lost on researching anomalies
NYSIF required a new budgeting, planning, forecasting, and reporting solution to eliminate inefficiencies and errors to integrate with their current source systems.
Why Oracle?
Recognizing the need for a modern and secure enterprise-level solution, NYSIF requested an Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service implementation. Oracle’s PBCS provides stable, repeatable processes with the flexibility to extend the system to additional users as needed. Additionally, it allows for application expansion in the future. Benefits of PBCS specifically suited to NYSIF’s needs include:
- Integration process with Oracle Financials General Ledger that identifies new accounting combinations
- Alternate hierarchy functionality that addresses reporting requirements without going outside of the system
- Oracle Smart View reporting that allows for end user reporting vs. administrator developed reporting
Implementation & Deployment
The Clarity Partners and CMA Consulting team worked closely with NYSIF to design, develop and implement their new financial planning application within a four-month time frame. Using an iterative and agile implementation approach, Clarity designed and developed two environments – development and production – for Oracle PBCS and Essbase, the underlying database engine. Clarity also developed the necessary integrations with:
- Oracle Data Management, which serves as the single point of data integration between PBCS and NYSIF’s source system, Oracle Financials.
- Oracle Smart View, which allows for integration with the Microsoft Office Suite for reporting purposes. NYSIF’s existing reporting was replicated using Smart View and additional reporting was defined during the project’s design phase.
Clarity was responsible for end-user training services and materials, and performed all testing, deployment, cut-over and go-live activities. Additionally, Clarity provided 30 days of post-implementation support.
Benefits
- Reduced costs with a cloud-based system
- Scalable, automated platform that is easy to use and understand for non-financial managers and staff
- System configuration meets complex reporting requirements
- Forecasting and “what-if” modeling capabilities
- More time to analyze data with automated reporting
- Improved communication of annual budget to stakeholders
- Secure access to data and application design
- Framework in place for future expansion
- Less IT reliant
What’s Next
Clarity is currently building in a Balance Sheet and Income Statement framework for daily reporting in PBCS.
In the future, there is potential for including a Fixed Asset and Accounts Payable module.
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