WA Business News: up-to-date on performance metrics
A leading state publisher chose SAP Business One to get on top of previously time-consuming financial reporting tasks...
For companies operating in the competitive world of publishing, keeping a close eye on day-to-day performance metrics is critical for ongoing commercial success.
Monitoring everything from subscription and circulation numbers to advertising bookings and staff costs ensures growth is achieved without any nasty financial surprises.
At WA Business News, such monitoring has been a key part of operations since starting life as a fortnightly newspaper in 1993. Established to provide an independent view of business activity in Australia’s resource-rich west, WA Business News has grown to become one of the leading publications in its state.
The privately owned publication is now a weekly paper, employing seven full-time journalists and 28 other staff. As well as its printed product, the company has a successful daily email newsletter and a constantly updated business news website.
Late last year the company realised its existing financial and reporting systems could no longer deliver the level of support required by its rapidly growing operations. Comprising a range of software applications and manual processes, the systems had evolved as the publication had grown, but were now reaching capacity limits.
Financial controller Ian Swarts said his organisation had relied on an MYOB software package to support its core financial activities, complimented by an SQL Server database that stored customer and transaction data.
“We are quite an IT dependent business,” he said. “As well as MYOB and our customer database, we also have a back-end transaction system for our website which allows users to do everything from renewing subscriptions to ordering reprints and booking tickets to events.”
While this infrastructure worked, it required considerable manual effort to create customer invoices in MYOB, based on details held in the customer database. The company was effectively running two different databases with a lot of duplicated information.
“Given the number of financial transactions we were processing, we had really stretched MYOB to its limit,” said Swarts. “We also realised we desperately needed to improve our reporting capabilities to have a clearer picture of how the company was performing.”
After reviewing a range of software packages on the market, a decision was made in November last year to implement SAP Business One.
“SAP Business One really stood out because of its reporting capabilities – it is a very strong product in this area,” said Swarts. “It also allowed us to link our customer database with our financials, removing much of the existing manual processes and duplication.”
WA Business News has a series of more than 20 variables it tracks each month to ensure operations are running smoothly. These include everything from the cost to produce each editorial page to the number of booked advertising pages and subscriptions sold. The variables are collated to form a dashboard summary that is used by the management board for forward planning.
Prior to SAP Business One, creating these reports required staff to input a large amount of data into Excel spreadsheets, a process that was both time consuming and prone to error.
Now, up-to-date reports are available essentially at the click of a button and are based on the most recent information entered into the customer database.
“We now have a single, clear picture of what is going on within the business,” he said.
The implementation of SAP Business One was completed by Courtland, an SAP reseller and consulting partner based in Western Australia. With skills in SAP Business One and SAP All-in-One, Courtland delivers business solutions to customers in a wide range of industry sectors.
For WA Business News, getting the new system implemented and running was not without its challenges. Moving to a single database flagged some problems with data accuracy and a new tool had to be developed to allow the database and SAP Business One to be linked.
“We had to spend a lot of time getting our database up to scratch because now anything that goes into it ends up on an invoice so it has to be accurate.”
Some changes also had to be made to cater for the company’s method of using advertising agencies to take bookings on behalf of some clients. Work was also completed on the design of forms as pre-printed stationary is not used. Rather, details such as terms and conditions are printed together with customer details on each invoice.
To ensure data accuracy during the change over, MYOB was run alongside SAP Business One for the first two months.
Once the new processes were deemed to be working efficiently, the old financials package was retired.
Swarts said there was considerable potential to increase usage of SAP Business One within the company in the future, to further streamline operations and improve efficiencies.
“There are many modules within the product that we are not yet using but it is good to know we have the extra capabilities there when we choose to turn them on,” he said.
One area earmarked is an upgrade of the company’s purchase order methodology, which will be supported by SAP Business One.
The company is also planning to expand its operations into other Australian states. Swarts said the Perth office would remain as an administrative hub, supporting other remote offices as required.
“I’m confident SAP Business One will be able to deliver what we need for a long period of time,” he said. “Its flexible and strong reporting capabilities have made it an integral part of our operations.”
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