Definitive Logic

OVERVIEW:

Financial Management includes planning and budgeting, funds distribution, general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and cash management. Definitive Logic has delivered solutions on both transactional as well as reporting and analytic aspects of each of these sub-domains. Our consultants have functional accounting expertise in both government and commercial organizations.

CASE STUDY:

Abstract:
In 2003, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began transformation from a highly-decentralized model to an integrated regional and national cross-functional team structure. This was highlighted by the creation of Regional Business Centers (RBC) to allow its 60+ previously self-managed districts to team into 8 regional business entities, thereby sharing resources and technical expertise and enhancing their overall quality and range of services.

Business Challenge:
Regionalization of USACE would likewise necessitate a regionalized financial management structure, in which the revolving fund, cash accounts, and overhead rates are balanced over an entire region, as opposed to the old model where each district operated as its own business.

Unfortunately because USACE accounting systems were all designed specifically to manage the finances on a district level, regional officers had no tools available to them to perform budget and resource management analysis.

How We Helped:
Working in conjunction with the USACE CFO and headquarters financial team, Definitive Logic in partnership with Next Tier Concepts Inc. formulated working groups at the regional level to define the reporting needs of the regional managers. Having previously established the environment for the USACE's Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), our team leveraged this platform to deliver monthly reporting and ad hoc analytical capabilities to replace their existing manual calculation processes.

Previously, the lead time for monthly reviews could be up to four weeks from the end of the month. The EDW delivers these metrics real time to all levels of management any time during the month to enhance decision making capabilities.

By providing visibility of data across USACE, our solution brought to light inconsistencies in both business process and financial rate calculation between different districts. Now the same data reported at the district and regional level will be consistently reported to upper management levels of USACE at headquarters.

The bottome line is that RBCs allow the Corps to provide better products for its customers at a considerable savings. By concentrating an expertise in one district, rather than having limited expertise in all districts across the region, USACE is more adept, more tuned into lessons learned from similar projects, and more integrated into the outside technical expertise on these issues.