Finance Reforms – Department of Defence

Chartertech is working alongside Branch and Project Managers across Defence Finance Group (DFG) to develop targeted projects and business as usual activities that would convert the Reform Program into actionable work projects. Each program of work was defined with an owner, objective, priority area, and initiatives and projects. Activities included:

• Reviewing the internal budget reporting environment and developing a new standardised reporting framework with consideration of consistency, systemisation and data visualisation.
• Researching, designing, developing and implementing a new financial reporting solution to provide clear, concise and accurate standardised reporting to senior defence committees and executives. All internal budget reports for the executive, including groups and services, are now standardised with all groups and services receiving consistent financial information.
• Providing independent technical advice to the senior executive on the transition from cash to accrual reporting. Chartertech subsequently transitioned the internal reporting solution to accrual reporting.
• Designing and implementing a forecasting framework and solution to integrate with reporting. This enabled Defence to forecast its entire budget at project, product and profit centre level.
• Conducting a review of the Chart of Accounts and providing recommendations to improve the integrity and structure of the data and to facilitate the provision of consistent reporting.
• Researching Defence’s future reporting requirements (internal and external) to design a suite of reports to be developed as part of the future SAP S4/HANA ERP.
• Designing and implementing an improved process and solution for the annual Integrated Investment Program Budget Estimates review of capital budgets (~$14b and 400 projects).

The benefits of the program to Defence are:

• Introducing a continuous cycle of improvement, where strategies are planned, implemented, evaluated, improved and monitored.
• Uplifting organisational capability, regularly enhancing staff skills to meet evolving changes through a program of learning, training and work process improvements.
• Responding and adapting technological advances and changing client needs by improving service offerings.