Public Sector Organizations Need High Quality Data to Drive Efficiency

By Jorge Ruiz on Jan 4, 2016

Today the global economic downturn has deeply affected the public sector, with nearly every organization feeling the weight of cost pressures. Reduced public funding and revenue shortfalls could be straining the ability of your organization to deliver basic services. With limited opportunities to generate additional revenue, your choices are limited to competing for available funding or operating on a slim budget. At the same time, you must deliver greater levels of service than you have in the past, with far fewer resources.

The demands on government entities typically focus on:

• Transparent processes
• Compliance and regulatory requirements
• Fiscal accountability

Errors in master data across multiple sources and applications can add significant costs to an organization in terms of missed business opportunities or dissatisfied citizens. Fragmented, or inconsistent data delays the time required to implement new applications, creates integration inefficiencies across processes, and limits productivity across citizen service functions. When employee, vendor or citizen data is duplicated, incomplete or inaccurate, public sector entities find difficulties in:

• Payroll Services
• Financial Accounting
• Vendor Records & Supplier Relationship Management
• Citizen Information Management
• Revenue Collections
• Policy Compliance, and Risk Management
• Service Delivery
• Benefits Eligibility

As a result, new risks are introduced, policies aren’t as effective, and citizen loyalty and trust is lost.

Differences between the Public and Private sectors

When comparing ERP implementations between the public and private sectors, there are several areas with noted differences:

• The culture and organizational structure in most public agencies tends to be more complex, with many departments and divisions having their own manager, business rules, and processes. In this type of political system, it becomes increasingly challenging to receive commitment and integration.
• Process owners are harder to identify in the public sector, and interaction with process owners and consultants can be difficult.
• Funding sources also vary between public and private sectors, and Government agencies usually have complex budgeting and allocation processes.
• Large-scale ERP implementations in the public sector tend to have a high level of organizational complexity, along with a high number of users across many ERP modules.
• Most public sector organizations on a worldwide scale share similar requirements, but each country has unique criteria, making it difficult to define “best practices.”

The Importance of data quality within the Public Sector

While data quality issues exist across all industries, the problem is heavily exacerbated in the public sector. This is primarily caused by “separate” agencies functioning independently and/or siloed, and reporting spread across local, regional, and national boundaries, (not to mention heterogeneous systems, non-integrated processes, and fragmented data). As data continues to grow exponentially, data quality can become compromised, requiring additional staff to fix, update, match, and share data across the organization. The public sector space has different segments that present unique challenges, however the common theme seems to be the need for efficiency, visibility, and transparency. With shrinking public budgets and ever changing government regulations, all segments are constantly looking for ways to stretch their limited resources.

How can Winshuttle help

Winshuttle’s Public Sector customers have successfully optimized over 300 different SAP transactions across all major departments. They’ve received the most benefits in HR, Finance and Plant Maintenance, but have also seen success in Controlling, Materials Management, Sales & Distribution, Inventory Management, Project Systems, and other areas.

During 2015, our Public Sector customers (including a wide range of cities, councils, regions, government organizations, agencies and even police departments) have saved an average of 255 working days in their HR departments by automating and optimizing SAP processes including personnel master data maintenance, payroll changes and time sheet data maintenance.

With Winshuttle, companies can reduce operational costs and increase business process agility and data accuracy through automation. Winshuttle’s workflow solutions provide a single authoring environment that automates key SAP processes and connects structured transactional data stored within ERP, CRM and other enterprise systems with the unstructured information that underlies all business processes.

Volume of SAP records uploaded and time savings from some of our Public Sector customers

Case Study: Winshuttle Pays Off for HR Department at Southwark Council

“Winshuttle does the job of three employees, it’s our workhorse. With Winshuttle, we can upload mass amounts of data directly from a spreadsheet. We can now send prepopulated spreadsheets to employees without ESS and 5,000 transactions can be updated in 30 minutes, which used to take over a week to complete!” – Susan Biggs, SAP HR/Payroll Officer, Southwark Council

The Council improved efficiency by minimizing SAP data entry in the HR department, and has expanded the use of Winshuttle in their Finance department to automate invoicing, journal entries, purchase orders, and accounts receivables among other processes. Read the full Southwark Council case study for more information.

Are you interested in optimizing and automating your SAP data operations? Join our London Public Sector workshop January 26th to hear success stories from Southwark Council and other Public Sector organizations.