University of Johannesburg cuts months off budgeting with IDU.

When the University of Johannesburg replaced its quarterly Excel-and-Oracle budgeting process with IDU-Concept in 2008, it cut months of manual effort down to weeks. UJ is one of South Africa's largest public universities — and one of its most unusually constituted. It came into existence on 1 January 2005 as the result of a merger between the Rand Afrikaans University, the Technikon Witwatersrand, and the Soweto and East Rand campuses of Vista University. That origin story matters: three distinct institutions, each with their own systems and structures, were folded into a single organisation. The result was a university spanning four campuses across the metropolitan area of Johannesburg — Auckland Park Kingsway, Auckland Park Bunting Road, Doornfontein, and Soweto — with more than 8 000 permanent and temporary staff and a student population of over 50 000, including more than 3 000 international students from 80 countries. The complexity that merger created did not stay in the organisational chart. It landed squarely in the finance function.

That merger left UJ's finance team managing an inherited estate of some 4 000 cost centres, 690 of which carried their own individual budgets spread across nine faculties. Every quarter, the task of processing data across all of those separate cost centres fell to finance staff who had no tool equal to the scale of the problem. The process ran in sequence: manually collate the data onto individual Excel spreadsheets for each cost centre, upload those spreadsheets into Oracle, then compile a budget summary for presentation to university management. Repeat, quarterly, across 690 budget cost centres. The cost was not only the time the cycle consumed. It also removed any possibility of real-time visibility or a picture of performance between quarterly reports.

"The process was extremely slow and timeconsuming, and we needed a solution desperately. Ideally we wanted a system that provided us with a complete database that we would be able to access at any time, and in a single report get a feel of how the budget was faring," says Ronel Jansen van Vuuren, director of cash management and financial reporting at UJ.

In May 2008, UJ implemented IDU-Concept across its 690 budget cost centres, completing the rollout in three weeks. Where the old process had confined budgeting to a quarterly event managed entirely by finance, the new system brought non-financial managers into the process with real-time data at each step — giving budget meetings a live picture of spend factors and enabling more accurate forecasting, rather than relying on a summary compiled weeks earlier. Drill-down reporting let managers trace variances directly to cost-centre level, including payroll, improving transparency and control. Actuals updated daily, and mobile access meant cost-centre managers could check their position at any point without waiting for a report.

IDU's consulting team worked closely with UJ through the implementation. That engagement surfaced HR budgeting requirements not previously addressed, and the guided implementation delivered rapid adoption across the university.

"IDU's consulting team identified requirements not previously catered for during the installation. Our development team then enhanced the system to provide the University of Johannesburg with worthwhile information for improving their HR budgets." — Margie Whitten, Director, IDU

The shift across UJ's finance function was measurable from the first reporting cycle after go-live. The budgeting cycle, which had previously stretched across months, was reduced to weeks — freeing finance staff to spend their time on planning and analysis rather than data gathering. Real-time visibility into budget performance at cost-centre level meant that management could make informed decisions as conditions changed, not after the fact. Centralised reporting replaced the manual cycle of Excel uploads entirely: data across all 690 budget cost centres now flowed into a single consolidated view, removing the errors and delays that manual collation had embedded into every quarter. And where payroll and HR budgets had previously been opaque between reporting cycles, drill-down reporting made vacancies and postings visible at a click — giving both finance and non-financial managers a level of HR insight the old process had never been able to provide.

"The reporting capability is easily accessible and convenient – we update our actuals daily and cost centre managers are able to see their spending at any time."

— Ronel Jansen van Vuuren, Director of Cash Management & Financial Reporting, University of Johannesburg