Oracle Customer Success—King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Boosts Planning and Budgeting Efficiency by Consolidating Data in the Cloud

With Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, we now have data on demand, enabling us to use our time more effectively and provide real business value to the university, instead of chasing down multiple spreadsheets and manually aggregating data.

— Jamie O’Brien, Manager – Planning and Budgeting Operations, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is a private university that focuses exclusively on graduate education and research, offering programs in biological and environmental science and engineering; computer, electrical, and mathematical science and engineering; and physical science and engineering—using English as the official language of instruction.

The university was opened in 2009, and already in 2013 had one of the fastest growing research and citation records in the world. KAUST has attracted top-notch faculty from all over the world, especially from the USA, Germany, China, Japan, and Italy. The high diversity among the faculty is also reflected in the student body, with more than 60 nations represented on campus. This multicultural environment, in which creativity and teamwork is quite valued, fosters great knowledge exchange and innovation. KAUST is often referred to as an “Arab MIT”, and has the third largest endowment of any university in the world following Harvard and Yale.

Business Challenge

Reduce the time and effort required to collect and process planning and budgeting information from each business section of the university— previously a cumbersome process managed offline using complex spreadsheets and email
Enable planning and budgeting staff to increase business value by spending more time on strategic tasks such as budget forecasting, analysis, monitoring, and reporting, and less time on data administration

Ensure that management reporting information is always accurate and up-to-date by enhancing the flow and security of planning and budgeting data covering a wide spectrum of components—including campus maintenance costs, expenses for running university shops and services, and investments in teaching and laboratory equipment used in science and technology research
Increase the visibility of budget submissions per department, faculty, and other areas of business across the university to ensure a timely and trouble-free annual budgeting cycle

Increased staff and business efficiency and enhanced analysis, monitoring, and management reporting throughout the planning and budgeting process by unifying all data—covering the entire university complex including faculties, student housing, shops, and bus services—on Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service
Reduced the overall time spent by planning and budgeting staff on data collection to 30%—down from more than 70%—freeing up the team for strategic tasks such as forecasting and analysis of faculty budgets and defining layouts for reporting

Empowered planning and budgeting team members to dedicate 70% of their time to monitoring and analysis, enabling them to identify and challenge budgeting figures that are out of tolerance, enhance decision making across the university, and provide more business value
Increased security and flow of data by using a single automated system for centralizing all planning and budgeting information in the cloud—enabling university staff involved in the budgeting process to populate the system at any time with financial data which is then automatically linked to PowerPoint presentations for managers
Eliminated budgeting errors caused by the manual management of multiple versions of spreadsheets—each containing thousands of tabs with university budgeting information—which previously needed to be emailed around independent departments of a particular faculty or business area and then individually copied, pasted, and formatted to reporting specifications
Provided the flexibility to easily make changes to the university’s planning and budgeting calculation models without needing to update and circulate multiple spreadsheet templates, because new calculation models are instantly applied throughout Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service
Increased budget monitoring capabilities and enabled in-depth analysis of costs per expenditure category—for example teaching equipment, or laboratory or technology resources for each faculty—to ensure spending consistency across the university
Ensured that planning managers and budget analysts always have on demand access to up-to-date financial information thanks to real-time aggregation of budget values on Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service
Enabled planning and budgeting staff to comfortably meet deadlines for the annual budgeting cycle without needing to work long evenings collecting data from the university’s business areas, aggregating it, formatting it, and then repeating the process from scratch whenever a particular department sent an updated spreadsheet
Enabled the university’s finance department to review the budgeting process at any time and see real-time information on budget submissions completed or outstanding across each business area of the university

We focused exclusively on our business requirements, and our final decision to choose Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service was based on a combination of high technical scoring, excellent customer references, and top feedback from the product demonstration to our various stakeholders.

— Jamie O’Brien, Manager – Planning and Budgeting Operations, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

About King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Headquarters

Thuwal, Saudi Arabia

Employees

2,500

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Partners

For managing the full project cycle of its system implementation, KAUST selected Oracle Platinum Partner Inplenion, which also played a key role in the vendor selection. KAUST’s business teams worked closely with Inplenion consultants, who were quick to understand the validated business requirements and enabled a rapid go-live. The cooperation continues today with Inplenion’s provision of support services.

“Inplenion consultants gave us great confidence by demonstrating that they always had our best interests at heart. Also, customer support is a key issue for us in Saudi Arabia, and so we really appreciate that they are always available on site when we need them,” O’Brien said.

Oracle Solutions Used

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service

Published: Jul 08, 2016