Global facilities management services company OCS, has recently taken out Financial Innovation Project of the Year at the 2022 New Zealand CFO Awards in Auckland for its transition to an innovative tool that simplifies its ‘not so simple’ data.
With a 4000-strong team, OCS Australia and New Zealand (OCS ANZ) needed an efficient, user-friendly and accurate system that utilised its data to provide business insights to managers and transparent, timely data to customers, helping with better decision-making across the business.
The task of transferring complex data and engaging team members, all while delivering the project on time and within budget, was a “momentous task” OCS Finance Director, Debby Wong, says.
“Following the integration of our New Zealand and Australian operations into a single region in 2017, we realised the amount of rich data that was available and, unfortunately, the opportunities we had missed out on by not utilising an innovative and integrated system.
“To bring OCS ANZ back into the driver’s seat, we developed a ‘bottom-up’ approach, ensuring users were involved in helping us select a new tool that would see us integrate 12 financial and administrations systems, across four business, to Microsoft Power BI – an interactive data visualisation software.”
OCS ANZ recognised Microsoft Power BI’s capability of pulling data out of its disparate back-end business systems, cleaning it, transforming it into simple visual reports, and creating dashboards capable of delivering insights to staff and customers was invaluable.
Although project winners at the NZ CFO Awards, Ms Wong says the real win is being able to present a wide variety of data in a format non-financial people understand.
“A key to the Power BI project was finding a way to control and utilise our data to get added value across the business. A goal we have now accomplished with the centralised data repository, allowing for deeper data mining which, in turn, provides invaluable corporate performance insights.”
OCS ANZ Managing Director Gareth Marriott accepted the award on behalf of the team, acknowledging the many hands that made a project of this scale work.
“OCS is a global, family-owned facilities management services company that has been operating in the Australia and New Zealand region for decades – with that comes an impressive amount of data that we were completely underutilising.
“Transitioning to Power BI enables us to access and interpret metrics and indicators, providing deeper business insights and adding value to our services.
“At a time when managing resources such as stock levels of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has been vital, our new system provides us with a detailed, yet simply displayed insight into inventory, value, and forecasting.”
Benefits also flow on to customers who now receive real-time access to financial, human resource, quality audit and sustainability information, allowing them to manage their operations efficiently.
Marriott says he’s beyond proud of the team who have transitioned, simplified, and set OCS up with a future-proofed system that enables the team to work smarter while providing valuable cleaning and facilities management services.