What company wouldn't want a performance gain of around 3750% in its budgeting system? If that company is one of the largest in the country, with a turnover of around 32 billion, we would say that this improvement is almost mandatory. AMcom helped one of the largest and most awarded breweries in the world, which was experiencing challenges with its budgeting system, such as slow reallocation, lack of access control, too many spreadsheets, as well as the challenge of extending the system and integrating it into its branches.
We know that technology can help with all these challenges and even improve, but you need to understand the scenario and know what you're doing and what you're doing it for. In the case of this client, the team was looking for a partner to revitalize the system, which was underperforming, and to speed up critical processes such as the change process - updating the system. In addition, there was a need to increase coverage throughout Latin America (LAS).
AMcom was entrusted with revitalizing the OBZ - Zero Based Budgeting - budgeting system, where the physical server made it very slow to reallocate budgets and trends, and there was a lack of control over the expected expenditure for the month. In addition, it took many days to implement changes and improvements to the system.
What is OBZ?
The OBZ is a strategic tool used by companies to draw up budget plans for a given period based on a zero base, i.e. without taking into account income, costs, expenses and investments from previous years (the famous historical base).
In OBZ, assumptions related to the function of each Revenue, Expense, Cost or Investment are analyzed, taking into account the company's strategic plans and needs, without using historical bases or readjustment indexes, as is done in the traditional model. Only then are the budget bases established.
Using best market practices and global service standards, as well as certified professionals dedicated to the project, AMcom offered customized systems development, ensuring greater competitiveness and cost savings for the business. The migration of the solution to the cloud was a crucial factor in making the services more dynamic, secure and reliable. In addition to providing greater cost control by eliminating, for example, direct data center expenses related to hardware maintenance. The cloud has ensured more focus on critical projects and processes, since backup routines, server maintenance and monitoring are no longer a concern. It has also generated greater scalability as the company has gained more performance and the ability to reallocate resources according to its needs.
A key factor in the success of this delivery was the use of the squad format. In short, Squad is an organizational model that consists of dividing the company's staff into small multidisciplinary teams. The most significant advantage of the Squad model over the traditional team division model is the agility with which projects are carried out.
In this specific case, we saw very significant improvements for the client:
"The changes will make routine easier both internally and externally. Activities that used to be onerous are now very fast and the user experience has improved a lot. The corrections have stopped reworking activities in the system and we can say that - although we still have improvements to make - we have raised the bar for the system, especially in terms of user experience, time and the inclusion of views that didn't exist before."
This was certainly a very satisfactory result for both AMcom and the client. We support the operation, meet demands at all levels and provide improvements and results to the client's solution, which certainly guarantees other benefits - already mentioned - such as more productivity, security and better usability.