For years, the Weill Cornell Medicine Budget office has relied on Excel as the official budgeting system. In April, after 16 months of intensive collaboration between ITS, the Budget Office, Business Process Solutions, department administrators, and our implementation partner LSI consulting, the SAP Budget and Planning (SBP) module officially launched in the Weill Business Gateway (WBG). The SBP module is a centralized solution that allows the central budget office to collect, maintain, and track WCM departmental budgetary information.
Building a budget solution
Before the SBP module launched, the WCM Budget Office used Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to send budget information out to departments. This method would have departments manually fill out the documents and send them out for approval, then email the approved forms back to the Budget Office to be uploaded to ECC, SAP’s ERP Central Component. It required employees to perform monumental tasks, like maintaining templates and changing departmental budgets, prevented salary projections from being done at an individual level, and lacked vital reporting functionality.
Our WCM teams sought to build and implement a solution that would remediate these pain-points, as well as offer an expansive suite of functionality, including in-year forecasting, operating budgets, salary and benefit forecasting, and all associated workflow, security, and reporting requirements.
Application Business Analysts in ITS worked with the Business Process Solutions team and the Budget Office to gather requirements and ensure that we were creating a tailored solution. A group of departmental users, assembled by the Budget Office, provided feedback to ITS on how they budget and what they wanted to see in the new solution. The work group remained engaged throughout the design phase by watching demos and participating in testing once the solution was ready.
The Business Process Solutions team was integral in helping our solution architects understand the intricacies of WCM’s budget process, which includes three primary phases:
- Budget initiation, when projections for the coming year are made,
- Budget development, when monies are requested and allocated
- Budget monitoring, when actual expenditures are tracked against estimates
The SBP solution includes forms that correspond to the tasks associated with each of these phases. The tool can systematically track departments’ budget inputs and report the status at any given time using integrated reports. It also allows for accurate salary and benefit projection and allocation, and allows departments to monitor budgets and reforecast periodically. It even lets budgets be spread by month, to better align with the timing of actuals.
The SBP module is accessed via the WBG dashboard. Prior the launch, Budget Director Andrew Rosenau trained over 100 current users in the tool over the course of three weeks. New users will gain access via a GRC request, and will be required to take in-person training.
As our teams reflect on the build and implementation of the module, it is clear how important it was to establish equal partnership between the Budget Office, ITS and our implementation partner in order to develop a tool that meets the precise needs of the WCM budget office, and to integrate it properly to ensure optimal performance for years to come.
The Base Request Form is available in SBP. This form is used during budget development to request base budgets for each fund.