Synergy to market SA-developed budgeting, forecasting solution

Business intelligence and management information systems specialist, Synergy Computing has been appointed a distributor of the South African-developed idu-Concept budgeting and forecasting capture and reporting solution.

The system, which has been proven at some of SA's largest organisations, has proven its ability to slash the budgeting and forecasting cycle from months to weeks. This is achieved by eliminating the manual consolidation of multiple spreadsheets and the enabling of simple centralised management of the status of individual submissions.

"It's a very powerful system that is on par with global solutions, yet, because of the rands-based development and user-friendly administration requirements, it costs significantly less than international offerings to acquire and operate," says Andrew Connold, managing director of Synergy Computing.

The system, developed by Cape Town-based idu Software, accommodates multiple companies, currencies, and business structures as well as both budget and forecast fiscal sets, which, although residing within the same system, exist completely independent of each other.

"With its comprehensive management information systems reporting capabilities, the solution fits in well with Synergy's established business intelligence and data warehousing specialisation and complements our other product and solution offerings," adds Connold.

Synergy is a leading South African provider of BI solutions based on Cognos BI tools which can be integrated with idu-Concept to provide in-depth analysis of accounting data and corporate performance management against strategies utilising balanced scorecarding or Six Sigma approaches.

"Among its powerful features are its Web-based functionality that enables users to enter and access data from an Internet browser, as well as its practical user interfaces designed for use by line managers who are not necessarily accounting literate. Other similar systems typically expect sales and operational personnel to be able to translate their forecasting into accounting ready formats."

Such Web-based functionality allows managers to easily generate budgets and forecasts, while referencing previous years actuals on the same screen, and to receive both general and user-specific reports timeously and conveniently. Although Web-based, updates to budgets and forecasts are online meaning that once entered the data is updated on the central server and retained, even in the event of a connection being dropped.

The whole solution has been designed to speed up the process of budgeting and forecasting in a corporate environment typically with a large number of users and cost centres. Concept has managed to cut budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes from months to weeks, even days. That translates into huge time and cost savings as well as improved competitiveness.

"idu-Concept is fully scalable from 20 users to thousands and is finding a ready market both locally and overseas," concludes Connold.