Case Study: Newcastle Permanent Building Society transforms workflows

Streamlining workflows across separate functions can create a single source of truth in the organisation and bring disparate parts of the business together.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Mark Colless, CFO at Newcastle Permanent Building Society about the organisation’s digital transformation journey and its investment in TechnologyOne.

According to Colless the organisation sought to streamline the manual process across the finance, HR and procurement functions. Having had prior experience working with TechnologyOne, Colless was able to vouch for the tech solution over other offerings in the market.

“We went through a detailed RFP process in terms of assessing, obviously with the CFO hat on I’m going to look at the financial side of it as well but, understanding what are the benefits for a lot of our staff and how do we bring that business single solution together?,” said Colless.

“That's where TechOne really stood out in terms of delivering across multiple areas, having that single source of truth and a real integrated solution.”

Colless said the solution has simplified processes for staff as well as delivering cost savings. However, despite the financial benefits, costs savings was not business’ end goal.

“It was more improving the environment, setting us up for success in the future. We know that the economic environment and the technology environment is constantly changing. So we need to be able to adapt and having a up-to-date system that's really at the forefront allows us to continue to evolve.”

Bringing employees, especially from the three business areas affected, along on the journey was critical to TechnologyOne’s successful deployment said Colless.

Not only is communication and early engagement critical, but empowering the teams to feel part of the solution was a key element of the transformation journey.

“It's not something that finance, HR, or procurement are actually doing to them. They're actually part seeing that solution and seeing what it looks like,” he said.

“So it's absolutely, top down, bottom up.”