Meat & Livestock Australia moves from spreadsheet to cloud

Headquartered in Sydney, MLA is the marketing, research and development body for Australia’s red meat and livestock industry. Established in 1998 following the merger of two industry statutory organisations – the Australian Meat & Livestock Corporation and the Meat Research Corporation - MLA is a not-for-profit organisation owned by more than 50,000 cattle, sheep and goat producers who pay a levy on livestock sales, with the federal government providing matching funds for research and development (R&D).

The group’s charter is to grow demand for red meat and improve the profitability, sustainability and global competitiveness of Australia’s meat producers. But the organisation was getting bogged down using spreadsheets for strategic planning and reporting back to the thousands of constituents to which MLA is accountable.

Challenge

When you have close to 50,000 paying members and funding from the government, trying to use spreadsheets for financial management and reporting is stressful and problematic — enough so, in fact, that it sent Meat & Livestock Australia Limited (MLA) to go looking for a modern cloud-based alternative.

Given the high degree of data manipulation required to report for different stakeholders’ requirements, accuracy issues increased reliance on time consuming manual checking procedures. Scenario management was a real challenge. It was difficult to compare what was reported in different months because MLA’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is set up based on allocations for various funding sources.

Solution

MLA cast the net wide when it went looking for a viable alternative, eventually considering more than 12 solutions. Ultimately the organisation chose Oracle’s Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) implemented by DXC Red Rock.

A key deciding factor for MLA, was DXC Red Rock’s Accelerator Templates for Oracle PBCS. These templates provide a unique, industry specific, best-practice approach to planning and budgeting, and enable and harness every ounce of PBCS’s capabilities.

MLA took a go-slow approach to start, as the team using the tool learned the product and fine-tuned it. But now they are hooked. MLA is using an integrated suite of Oracle data-based planning models that talk to each other and a sequential planning process that enables MLA to meet the organisation’s rules about keeping funding sources separate and applying a certain cost-allocation methodology.

Results

Keeping track of what was previously forecast and doing analysis to fine-tune forecasting — which was so difficult in Excel — is easy to do in Oracle PBCS with scenario management.

Now MLA can use Oracle PBCS to generate reports and track how the organisation is doing against individual KPIs, including flags to show whether they are off-track. The tool can also roll them all up and show if MLA is on track to deliver on its annual objective or its 5-year strategic objective.

Financial planning is faster, and there are fewer errors; reporting for each constituent is easier, with many reports automated, plus employees spend less time on data manipulation and more time on higher-value functions. With data-driven information, stakeholders can be confident that investments are being managed effectively.

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